Study of coherent π0 electroproduction on 4He with recoil detection

This thesis describes the development and test of a dedicated recoil detector built for the Internal Target Facility (ITF) at the Amsterdam Pulse Stretcher and storage ring (AmPS) of the 'Nationaal Instituut voor Kernfysica en Hoge-Energiefysica' (NIKHEF) in Amsterdam. This detector was built to detect low-energy (about 1 to 20 MeV/nucleon) and lowmass (A≤4) recoiling nuclei emerging from electron-induced reactions. It is described in detail in chapter 3. Furthermore, the results of the first coincidence experiment performed with this recoil detector are presented in this work. In this pilot run, performed in July 1996, the reaction 4He(e, e' 4He)π0 was studied in the Δ-region, with the aim to study the energy and angle dependence of this reaction at different momentum transfers and also the high-t behaviour of the cross section. (orig./WL)