Deep Inelastic Transfer Reactions - A New Way to Exotic Nuclei?

We studied deep inelastic multinucleon transfer reactions in collisions of Ni-64+Pb-207 and Ca-48+U-238 at energies around the Coulomb barrier. The experiments were performed at the velocity filter SHIP at GSI Darmstadt. One of the goals was to investigate if deep inelastic transfer is superior to fragmentation reactions for producing neutron-rich isotopes in the astrophysically interesting region of nuclei along the magic neutron number N = 126. With both collision systems, rather neutron-rich transfer products were populated, some of them reaching out to the limits of the present chart of nuclides. New isotopes could not be identified. A comparison of the measured transfer cross-sections and yields with those from fragmentation reactions allowed for interesting conclusions.