New highly excited states of ¹⁰Be observed in charged particle decay

Highly excited states of Be-10 are formed by the bombardment of Li-7 targets by Li-7 beams at 34 and 50.9 MeV from the Florida State University Tandem/LINAC accelerator facility. The states are observed in three-body final state reactions by coincidence measurement of the vector momenta of two of the three particles and reconstruction of the decay energies. We observe decays involving Li-7, Li-8, Li-9, and He-6 in their ground states, first excited states, and in some cases second excited states. Fifteen of the 18 excitations observed are proposed as possible new states of Be-10. A few alpha-particle decays of excited boron isotopes are also reported.