Mesonic fusion - pion and eta meson production in light ion nuclear fusion reactions

The present thesis describes two experiments performed in the storage ring CELSIUS at The Svedberg Laboratory in Uppsala. In the first experiment the importance of three - nucleon clustering in the six - nucelon system was investigated. The total cross section for the production of the ground state and the 3.56 MeV second excited state of 6Li in the 3He(3He,6Li)π+ reaction has been measured at two beam energies, 261.1 and 262.5 MeV, corresponding to center - of - mass energies 1.2 and 1.9 MeV above the production threshold for the 3.56 MeV state. For the ground state the result was 347 ± 84 ± 42 and 92 ± 84 ± 11 nb respectively. The result for the 3.56 MeV state, 104 ± 23 ± 12 and 56 ± 35 ± 7 nb respectively, is compared to the result of a previous study where the 3.56 MeV state was populated in the d(4He,6Li)π0 reaction. In the second experiment a clean sample of 5×105 eta mesons was prepared by means of the d(p,3He)η reaction. Eta production was tagged by the precise determination of the kinetic energy of the associated 3He ions. In the subsequent decay of eta mesons, channels with lepton - anti - lepton pairs were studied in the WASA detector. In a separate study properties of the WASA deuterium pellet target were investigated and in particular the effects on the beam of the beam - target interactions. In both sets of experiments the fused nuclear system was detected by means of a zero - degree spectrometer with a semiconductor detector telescope. Choosing the detectors to match the rather different requirements, precise information regarding the identity and the momentum of the detected ions could be obtained in both cases