Nuclear photonics at ultra-high counting rates and higher multipole excitations

Next-generation γ beams from laser Compton-backscattering facilities like ELI-NP (Bucharest)] or MEGa-Ray (Livermore) will drastically exceed the photon flux presently available at existing facilities, reaching or even exceeding 1013 γ/sec. The beam structure as presently foreseen for MEGa-Ray and ELI-NP builds upon a structure of macro-pulses (∼120 Hz) for the electron beam, accelerated with X-band technology at 11.5 GHz, resulting in a micro structure of 87 ps distance between the electron pulses acting as mirrors for a counterpropagating intense laser. In total each 8.3 ms a γ pulse series with a duration of about 100 ns will impinge on the target, resulting in an instantaneous photon flux of about 1018 γ/s, thus introducing major challenges in view of pile-up. Novel γ optics will be applied to monochromatize the γ beam to ultimately ΔE/E∼10−6. Thus level-selective spectroscopy of higher multipole excitations will become accessible with good contrast for the first time. Fast responding γ detectors, e.g...