GREAT : Studies of Nuclei far from Stability by Tagging Techniques

Introduction Electronics Current Status Publications Technical Documents Contacts

Project Description

GREAT is a highly sensitive detection system that will be deployed at the focal plane of some of the worlds most efficient recoil separators (e.g.: RITU at the University of Jyväskylä, the FRS and SHIPat GSI, or VAMOS at Ganil). Such a recoil tagging system must be highly segmented, provide the best energy resolution possible and to have the highest achievable detection efficiency. Furthermore, the large number of detector signals must be read out at high rates and the events of interest selected according to the temporal and spatial associations dictated by the physics of the experiment, without incurring unacceptable data losses.

The GREAT project is a collaboration between the Nuclear Physics Group at Daresbury, and the nuclear physics groups at the University of Liverpool, Manchester University, University of Surrey, York University and Keele University within the United Kingdom. GREAT was funded by EPSRC grants to these institutions.

The grant report IGR can be found here.

The GREAT collaboration is part of the HENS (Heavy and Exotic Nuclear Studies) collaboration. This is a pan european collaboration between the U.K., Finland (Jyväskylä), Germany (GSI) and France (GANIL).

GREAT is also part of the EXOTAG collaboration, an EU RTD project within the 5th framework.

GREAT is also part of the INTAG collaboration, an EU JRA project within the 6th framework.

The SAGE and LISA project have recently been funded by EPSRC. The talks presented at the kick-off meeting held at Daresbury on 2nd September can be found here.

The GREAT spectrometer is designed to measure the properties of the reaction products transported to the focal planes of recoil separators. GREAT comprises five distinct components:

  • Double Sided Silicon Strip Detectors into which the reaction products are implanted and used to measure subsequent alpha particle, beta particle or proton emission.  
  • An Array of Silicon PIN photodiode Detectors to measure conversion electron energies.  
  • A Double-sided planar Germanium strip Detector to measure the energies of X-rays, low energy gamma rays and beta particles.
  • A High efficiency segmented Germanium CLOVER Detector to measure the energies of higher energy gamma rays.
  • A Multiwire proportional counter this is placed in front of the silicon strip detectors to act as an active recoil discriminator.
  • Total Data Readout This is a new concept that dramatically decreases the dead time of the DAQ allowing more data to be taken. This concept is discussed on the electronics pages.
The silicon strip detectors and the germanium detectors are segmented in order to enable position correlations to be made with the associated decays in the particle detectors, while the separation of the photon energy into two types of Germanium detector provides the greatest flexibility and performance.


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Last modified: Tue Jun 29 11:58:30 GMT Daylight Time 2004