The european FAZIA initiative: a high-performance digital telescope array for heavy-ion studies

¹ INFN, Sezione di Firenze and Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Firenze, Italy
² Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Bologna and INFN, Sezione di Bologna, Italy
³ GANIL, CEA/DSM-CNRS/IN2P3, B.P. 5027, F-14076 Caen cedex, France
⁴ Institut de Physique Nucléaire, CNRS/IN2P3, Université Paris-Sud 11, F-91406 Orsay cedex, France
⁵ LPC, IN2P3-CNRS, ENSICAEN et Université de Caen, F-14050 Caen-Cedex, France
⁶ INFN, Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, Padova, Italy
⁷ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Padova, Italy
⁸ Nevsehir University, Science and Art Faculty, Physics Department, Nevsheir, Turkey
⁹ Jagiellonian University, Institute of Nuclear Physics IFJ-PAN, PL-31342 Kraków, Poland
¹⁰ Warsaw University, Poland
¹¹ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università Federico II di Napoli and INFN, Sezione di Napoli, Italy

^a e-mail: casini@fi.infn.it

Published online: 20 March 2014

Abstract

The european Fazia collaboration aims at building a new modular array for charged product identification to be employed for heavy-ion studies. The elementary module of the array is a Silicon-Silicon-CsI telescope, optimized for ion identification including pulse shape analysis, too. The achievement of top performances imposes specific electronics which has been developed by the FAZIA collaboration and includes high quality charge and current preamplifiers, coupled to fully digital front-end. During the initial R&D phase, original and novel solutions have been tested in prototypes, obtaining unprecedented ion identification capabilities. FAZIA is now constructing a demonstrator array consisting of about two hundreds telescopes arranged in a compact and transportable configuration. In this contribution, we mainly summarize some aspects studied by FAZIA to improve the ion identification. Then we will briefly discuss the FAZIA program focused on experiments to be done with the demonstrator. First results on the isospin dynamics obtained with a reduced set-up demonstrate well the performance of the telescope and represent a good starting point towards future investigations with both stable and exotic beams.