β decay of He 6 into the α+d continuum

M. Pfutzner et al.; 7 pags.; 6 figs.; PACS number(s): 23.40.Hc, 27.20.+n, 29.40.Cs; Open Access funded by Creative Commons Atribution Licence 3.0© 2015 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. The rare β-decay channel of He6 into the α+d continuum was investigated at the REX-ISOLDE facility. Bunches of postaccelerated He6 ions were implanted into the optical time projection chamber (OTPC), where the decays with emission of charged particles were recorded. This novel technique allowed us to extend the low-energy end of the spectrum down to 150 keV in α+d center of mass, corresponding to a deuteron energy of 100 keV. The branching ratio for this process amounts to [2.78±0.07(stat)±0.17(sys)]×10-6. The shape of the spectrum is found to be in a good agreement with a three-body model, while the total intensity is about 20% larger than the predicted one.The work was partially supported by the Polish National Science Center under Contract No. UMO-2011/01/B/ST2/01943, by the European Nuclear Science and Applications Research (ENSAR) under Project No. 262010, by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), by GOA/2010/010 (BOF KU Leuven), and by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BriX network P7/12).Peer Reviewe