Structure and reactions of drip-line nuclei

Secondary radioactive beams produced at intermediate-energy heavy-ion accelerators have in a short time span added a new dimension to the research on nuclear species at the limits of particle stability, and new detection techniques have made it possible to study reactions caused by incident beams of as little as one particle per second. Imminent developments such as the M.S.U. Coupled-Cyclotron Facility are expected to extend the range and to permit the observation of many previously inaccessible species. For a perspective on the progress in this area one only needs to go about fifteen years back to a time when it had just become possible to study the radioactivity of rare nuclear species such as 11Li. In presenting early experiments with secondary beams produced in fragmentation James Symons said open-quotes... In the introduction to this paper we questioned the applicability of high-energy heavy-ion accelerators to this field. Our experience at the Bevalac leads us to believe that this question does indeed have a positive answer. If the physics interest justifies it, then high-energy heavy-ion beams can certainly be expected to play a role in the study of nuclei at the limits of stability.close quotes At the time, very few, if any, realized how prophetic this remark was. In the present paper the interpretation of the longitudinal-momentum distributions from the nuclear fragmentation of single-nucleon halos is discussed. It is pointed out that these measurements, at least for the cases studied so far, directly reflect the halo wave function, and that there is no direct contribution from the reaction mechanism. This is an important difference from the radial momentum distributions, for which diffractive processes play an important role. The author discusses stripping reactions of 11Be and 8B on light nuclei yielding 10Be and 7Be