We have a similarly exciting Coulomb-excitation program at iThemba LABS using accelerated stable beams. We ran a two-month Coulomb-excitation campaign at iThemba LABS during March-May 2016 in order to investigate the intriguing zig zag of nuclear shapes observed at the end of the sd-shell. This long run involved accelerated 32S, 36Ar and 40Ar beams and a dedicated set up similar to the one at HIE-ISOLDE. The long run of these experiments would not have been successful without the involvement of the nuclear physics groups at UWC and iThemba LABS.
These measurements at iThemba LABS present exciting physics projects as well as excellent training to our students, who can set up and run these kind of measurements on their own. Moreover, they have mastered the complicated data sorting and data analysis, and recently determined the spectroscopic quadrupole moments of the first 2+ states in 12C, 20Ne and 40Ar for the first time using the enhanced reorientation effect at safe energies and the particle-gamma coincidence technique with state-of-the-art double-sided silicon detectors.
