A beam of 250A MeV 17O ions was scattered from argon and xenon targets. The large excess of fast neutrons compared with statistical model calculations that was observed earlier for xenon, was confirmed and found for argon as well. Analysis and calculations show that a considerable fraction of these neutrons can be interpreted as coming from direct knock-out reactions.
The angular distributions do not support the suggestion of using fast heavy ion scattering as a probe for the study of the neutron skin in nuclei. While the basic idea that a heavy projectile tends to sample the neutron wave function near the surface of the nucleus is sound, the measured neutron distribution is not as distinct as suggested by the previous experiment. This makes it difficult to distinguish direct reactions from other channels, such as semi-direct decay of giant resonances.
The improvements in the experimental methods have made the concept of using the CELSIUS storage and cooler ring as an internal magnetic spectrometer attractive for other of experiments presently being prepared.