Studies of Deuteron Breakup Reactions in Deuteron–Deuteron Collisions at 160 MeV with BINA

A rich set of differential cross section of the three-body $$^{2}$$ H(d,dp)n breakup reaction at 160 MeV deuteron beam energy has been measured over a large range of the available phase space. The experiment was performed at KVI in Groningen, the Netherlands, using the BINA detector. The cross-section data for the breakup reaction have been normalized to the simultaneously measured $$^{2}$$ H(d,d) $$^{2}$$ H elastic scattering cross section. The breakup cross sections obtained for 147 kinematically complete configurations near the quasi-free scattering kinematics are compared to the recent approximate calculations for the three-cluster breakup in deuteron–deuteron collisions. The cross sections for 294 kinematic configurations of the quasi-free scattering regime, for which no theoretical calculations exist, are also presented. Besides the three-body breakup, semi-inclusive energy distributions for the four-body $$^{2}$$ H(d,pp)nn breakup are reported.