Study of the Hoyle state in $^{12}$C produced by $^{20}$Ne + $^{12}$C reactions

International audienceSince its discovery, the Hoyle state of 12C has attracted much interest. Its properties have been discussed several times, due to its cluster structure and the astrophysical implications. In this contribution, the Hoyle state decay has been studied using 20Ne+12C reactions at 25 MeV/nucleon. The invariant mass method has been used to get all the properties of the original 12C starting from a 3-α correlation. The background in the reconstructions was removed using the event mixing method. Finally, we made a simulation of the 3-α decay, including the effects of angular and energy resolutions assuming different possible modes. As a first result, we show a qualitative agreement of the experimental data with the simulated sequential decay. Further studies are ongoing to precisely extract the branching ratios and all the uncertainties due to the simulation parameters