Production of $N = 126$ Nuclei and Beyond Using Multinucleon Transfer Reactions

International audience; Production of neutron-rich nuclei around N = 126 by multinucleon transfer reactions has recently gained a renewal of interest both theoretically and experimentally. We are now advancing the KISS project at RIKEN to produce those nuclei by multinucleon transfer reactions and measure their lifetimes to investigate the astrophysical environments of the r-process. To investigate the relevance of the production mechanism, we performed measurements for the reaction system 136Xe + 198Pt, using the spectrometer VAMOS++ and the gamma-ray array EXOGAM at GANIL. Cross sections deduced from the measurements for neutron-rich nuclei around N = 126 show a modest enhancement when compared with the GRAZING calculations, indicating the advantage of the multinucleon transfer reactions as compared with fragmentation for production of N = 126 neutron-rich isotones. The possibility for production of neutron-rich nuclei around uranium beyond N = 126 by multinucleon transfer reactions is also discussed.