Gamma ray beams for nuclear astrophysics: First results of tests and simulations of the ELISSA array

The Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) facility, under construction in Magurele near Bucharest in Romania, will provide high-intensity and high-resolution gamma ray beams that can be used to address hotly debated problems in nuclear astrophysics. For this purpose, a silicon strip detector array (named ELISSA) will be realized in a common effort by ELI-NP and INFN-LNS (Catania, Italy), in order to measure excitation functions and angular distributions over a wide energy and angular range. A prototype of ELISSA was built and tested at Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (INFN-LNS) in Catania with the support of ELI-NP. On this occasion, we carried out experiments with alpha sources and with a 11 MeV 7Li beam. Thanks to our approach, the first results of those tests show up a very good energy resolution (better than 1%) and very good position resolution, of the order of 1 mm. Below 1 MeV, a resolution of the order of 6 mm is found, still good enough for the measurement of angular distribution and the kinematical identification of the reactions induced on the target by gamma beams.