Study of the Exotic Decay Mode of ²⁰Na with an Intense ISOL Beam

Beijing Radioactive Ion-beam Facility(BRIF) has been commissioned as the national Radioactive Ion Beam(RIB) facility based on the Isotope Separator On Line(ISOL) technique since 2016. At BRIF, the radioactive nuclides are produced by the proton beam of 100 MeV bombarding a thick-target, the reaction products diffusing out of the target are ionized by an ion source and delivered to the online mass separator. In addition to the post-accelerated radioactive ion beams, BRIF can provide low-energy ISOL beams of 100 to 300 keV with a mass resolution of 20 000. A general-purpose decay station has been built including the ISOL beam transport line, a conventional reaction chamber, charge-particle and γ detectors with integrated electronics and data acquisition system. An intense ²⁰Na ISOL beam up to 1×10⁵ pps was produced by using the 100 MeV proton beam bombarding a MgO thick target. With high-efficiency measurements of β, γ and α simultaneously, very rare β-γ-α decay mode in ²⁰Na has been directly observed for the first time in the present work.