Development of the ELISSA array: prototype testing at Laboratori Nazionali del Sud

摘要

The Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) facility, underconstruction in Magurele near Bucharest in Romania, will provide high-intensity andhigh-resolution gamma ray beams that can be used to address hotly debated problems in nuclear astrophysics, such as the accurate measurements of the cross sections of the~(24)Mg( γ,α )_(20)Ne reaction For this purpose, a silicon strip detector array (named ELISSA) will be realized in acommon effort by ELI-NP and Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (INFN-LNS), 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 INFN-LNS in Catania (Italy) with the support of ELI-NP. In this occasion, we have carried out experiments with alpha sources and with a 11 MeV~(7)Li beam that show up a very good energy resolution (better than 1%) and very good position resolution, of the order of 1 mm. Moreover, a threshold of 150 keV can be easily achieved with no cooling.