Discovery of doubly-magic 48Ni at GANIL

An experiment was performed at GANIL using a high-intensity 58Ni beam at 74.5 MeV/nucleon on a nickel target. The projectile fragments produced in the high-acceptance SISSI device were selected in the LISE3 spectrometer using the Wien filter. The detection setup performed an unambiguous identification of four 48Ni implantation events. A lower limit of its half-life of the order of 0.5 μs and an estimate of the production cross section of about 0.05 pb were deduced. In addition, a few tens of 45Fe and 49Ni nuclei were implanted, which may give information on their decay modes. Besides, 48Ni and 45Fe are very good candidates for two-proton radioactivity, still to be observed