Analysis methods of safe Coulomb-excitation experiments with radioactive ion beams using the GOSIA code

Abstract

With the recent advances in radioactive ion beam technology, Coulomb excitation at safe energies becomes an important experimental tool in nuclear-structure physics. The usefulness of the technique to extract key information on the electromagnetic properties of nuclei has been demonstrated since the 1960’s with stable beam and target combinations. New challenges present themselves when studying exotic nuclei with this technique, including dealing with low statistics or number of data points, absolute and relative normalisation of the measured cross sections and a lack of complementary experimental data, such as excited-state lifetimes and branching ratios. This paper addresses some of these common issues and presents analysis techniques to extract transition strengths and quadrupole moments utilising the least-squares fit code, gosia.