Development and operation of gas catchers to thermalize fusion-evaporation and fragmentation products

A new approach to the production of low energy radioactive beams involves the stopping of fast beams produced by fragmentation, in-flight fission or fusion-evaporation reaction into a large gas catcher where the reaction products are thermalized in high-purity helium and extracted as singly charged ions for post-acceleration. This removes the limitation present in standard ISOL technique for species that are difficult to extract from the target/ion source assembly. This approach has been implemented at Argonne since 1998 to inject fusion-evaporation products in an ion trap system. Via a series of improvements since then, we now reach efficiencies for these devices of close to 50% with delay times below 10 ms. In preparation for the RIA project, a larger device for stopping fragmentation products is in preparation. The basic principles behind these devices together with results obtained and experience gained operating these devices will be presented. Preparation for a test of the large gas cell at the full RIA energy at GSI will also be presented