Recirculating windowless gas-target systems
are important instruments for low energy measurements of relevance for
nuclear astrophysics. The gas provides pure target material conditions,
and the beam energy loss is minimized so that the measurements can be
pursued towards very low energies. The Rhinoceros gas-target from the
University of Stuttgart has been installed at the Notre Dame Nuclear
Science Laboratory for measuring the low energy cross sections of
alpha capture reactions in stellar helium burning.
The gas-target has been tested with different
gas loads to study the performance for different gas types at different
beam energies and intensities. These tests have been successfully completed.
The gas-target is presently used for measuring
critical reactions for neutron production in stellar helium burning
such as 18O(a,g)22Ne, 22Ne(a,g)26Mg,
and 22Ne(a,n)25Mg taking advantage of the high
alpha beam intensities provided by the low energy Notre Dame accelerators.
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