Investigating the excitation spectrum of [superscript 8]He from inelastic scattering with deuterons

1 online resource (viii, 40 pages) : colour illustrations, charts (some colour), graphs (some colour)Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (page 40).Rare isotopes are nuclei with very short half-lives and can have a large asymmetry of neutrons to protons. These isotopes can have unusual structures such as halos that can exhibit a phenomenon known as a Soft Dipole Resonance (SDR). One rare isotope of interest is 8-Helium (8He) which is the most neutron-rich bound nucleus currently known, with a neutron to proton ratio of 3. In previous investigations of 8He two excited states (2+ and 1+) were observed with drastically conflicting reportson their locations. The inconsistent reports on the 2+ state, in particular, have been postulated to be due to the excited state being mixed with a low-lying SDR state. Through an experiment conducted at the IRIS facility located at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle acceleration center, the excited spectrum of 8He has been investigated. The goal of this study is to get additional measurements on the excited states of 8He as well as explore the possibility of the 2+ state being mixed with a SDR. In this thesis,I will outline the experimental set up and the data analysis to determine the Q-value spectrum of 8He from the 8He(d,d′) 8He∗ reaction