A novel radiochemical technique for measuring very low fusion cross sections

Abstract The study of sub-barrier fusion is important to understand the dynamics of reactions involving weakly bound exotic nuclei. In most cases cross sections well below ≈ 1 mb need to be determined, but the limited beam intensity and background poses a great experimental challenge to measure it accurately. To overcome these problems we discuss a novel technique based on the use of radiochemical analysis. The advantages and limitations of this method are compared with the direct α -counting technique using the reaction 208 Pb( 7 Li, 210 Po) at E l a b = 39.3 MeV. The experiments were carried out at the BARC-TIFR Pelletron-Linac accelerator facility in Mumbai, India, and the radiochemical analysis at the University of Huelva, Spain.