A time-of-flight application for nuclear reactions at Coulomb energies

The Thick-Target Inverse Kinematics Resonant Scattering Method is an important tool for investigating resonances of the compound nucleus, spanning a wide center-of-mass energy range by using a single mono-energetic heavy-ion beam. The thick target can be solid (point-like) or gaseous. Anyhow, a limit of such a technique is related to the possible energy overlap of the same ejectile produced by different reaction mechanisms. These ejectiles have different paths inside the target allowing Time-of-Flight (ToF) discrimination. Thus, in order to disentangle different reaction channels and to get, for example, a clean elastic cross-section excitation function, a ToF event by event measurement can be performed in the case of gaseous targets. Several elastic scattering measurements on 4He gas targets were performed by using light ions. In this paper, the preliminary results of a heavy ion beam (A = 208) impinging on a 4He gas target at energies around the Coulomb barrier will be shown.