SHARAQ Project: Progress in 2009

On March 23, 2009, the first beam was successfully transported to the final focal plane of the SHARAQ spectrometer. We investigated detector responses to heavy-ion beams and the ion optical properties of the SHARAQ spectrometer1) and the high-resolution beam line2) in the subsequent commissioning runs and found that the system as a whole worked almost as per its design. The first physics run with the spectrometer was performed in November 2009. In this article, we review the progress in the SHARAQ project in 2009.