Reaction dynamics of neutron rich nuclei in Ca isotopes with heavy ions and gamma spectroscopy

The thesis work concerns the experimental study of the population and gamma-decay of n-rich nuclei around 48Ca using deep-inelastic collisions (DIC) on 64Ni, at energies ~2.5 times above the Coulomb barrier. The experiment has been performed at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro (Padova), with an experimental setup consisting of the CLARA Ge array coupled to the PRISMA magnetic spectrometer. DIC are proved to be a powerful tool to study nuclear properties far from stability, while the study of the reaction dynamics is a starting point for extracting nuclear structure information. A large fraction of the work consists in a careful evaluation of the response of the PRISMA magnetic spectrometer, which is here done for the first time. The response is calculated on basis of a Monte Carlo simulation of the transport of the ions into the spectrometer, making use of a ray tracing code procedure which uses numerical integrators to determine the trajectories into the magnetic fields. The experimental results concern in a detailed investigation of the reaction properties, such as total cross sections and angular distributions of the most relevant transfer channels. In particular, angular distributions are extracted both energy integrated and in coincidence to specific nuclear states, such as transitions to the ground state and the first excited states. The results are compared with predictions from the semiclassical multi-nucleon transfer model, which is found to reproduce well the data corresponding to 0p, -1p and +1p channels. In addition, in the case of the 0 p, +/- 1p and +/- 1n channels, angular distributions of the first excited states are interpreted in terms of DWBA calculations, providing information on spectroscopic factors and particle-vibration coupling.