Nuclear interactions of high energy heavy ions and applications in astrophysics: Technical progress report, 1 April 1987-31 March 1988

During the past year of activity at Louisiana State University we have made significant progress in the data analysis, in new experimental runs and in hardware development for experiments scheduled for Bevalac time in Spring '88. We have resolved several experimental problems associated with background in the 225 MeVnucleon 16O dataset and now have reliable longitudinal momentum distribution at this energy. We habe finished the telescope calibration for the 170 and 360 MeVnucleaon 16O datasets and have preliminary angular distributions. With the University of Siegen group, we have developed and tested a new drift chamber system to provide position sensing for our planned experiments. New data on total charge changing cross sections for 28Si was acquired at four beam energies, and this dataset is currently being analyzed. We are finishing modifications on the forty channels of preamplifiers and shaping amplifiers used in this experiment, constructing new hardware to mate the drift chamber scoper and new solid state detectors together, and are developing new on-11 ne monitoring software for the coming runs with 28Si, and 20Ne. 16 figs