Nuclei far from stability using exotic targets

The meson factories have made possible high fluence medium energy proton beams that can be used for spallation reactions to produce macro quantities of unstable isotopes. Targets of over 10 g/cm/sup 2/ can be exposed to total fluence approaching 1 A-hour resulting in spallation yields in the 0.01-10 mg range for many isotopes of potential interest for nuclear structure studies. With the use of hot cell facilities, chemical processing can isolate the desired material and this coupled with subsequent isotope separation can result in usable quantities of material for nuclear target application. With offstable isotopes as target materials, conventional nuclear spectroscopy techniques can be employed to study nuclei far from stability. The irradiation and processing requirements for such an operation, along with the isotope production possibilities, are discussed. Also presented are initial experiments using a /sup 148/Gd (t/sub 1/2/=75a) target to perform the (p, t) reaction to establish levels in the proposed double magic nucleus /sup 146/Gd. (17 refs).