Measuring fusion excitation functions with RIBs: a thorough analysis of the stacked target technique and the related problems

The use of the stacked target technique to measure fusion cross-sections of reactions induced by low intensity radioactive beams offers considerable advantages since several reaction energies may be simultaneously measured. The main disadvantage of the method is the degradation of the beam quality as it passes through the stack due to statistical nature of energy loss processes and any non-uniformity of the stacked targets. This degradation can lead to ambiguities of associating effective beam energies to reaction product yields for the targets within the stack. A detailed investigation of these ambiguities has been performed and some of the obtained results are presented.