Discovery of new isotopes plutonium-224 and uranium-220

This project aims to make the discovery of the new isotopes plutonium-224 and uranium-220. These isotopes will permit a measure of the robustness of the N = 126 shell closure. An experiment was performed at the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyvaskyla in which fusion-evaporation reactions were performed using a beam of sulphur-32 ions and a target composed of platinum-196. The experiment used the RITU gas-filled recoil separator to isolate the evaporation residues from the scattered beam and to transport them to the focal plane. At the focal plane, the radioactive decay of the fusion-evaporation products was studied using a suite of detectors including silicon and high-purity germanium detectors. The data will be analysed using standard recoil decay tagging techniques to correlate the decay of the unknown plutonium-224 and uranium-220 decays with the known alpha-decay of thorium-216.