ABSTRACT

Heavy-ion physics deals with the phenomena that occur when two nuclei are brought into contact such that the nuclear forces that hold the protons and neutrons together within one nucleus are felt by the other nucleus. Coulomb excitation below the Coulomb barrier is specifically suited to excite the rotational and low-frequency vibrational modes. Because of the slow variation of the Coulomb field in space, it can only excite modes of low multipolarity. A possibility of combining Coulomb and nuclear inelastic scattering with transfer processes lies in the study of the spectroscopy of the so-called yrast levels. The lowest state of each subspectrum, the yrast level, has an energy which on the average increases with angular momentum. The basic feature of deep-inelastic reactions is that one observes scattered particles, which, in contrast to the quasielastic reactions, have lost a large fraction of their kinetic energy, but still have mass and charge rather close to those of the projectile.