3. Hot nuclear material

Over the last thirty years, heavy-ion gas pedals have developed rapidly, enabling us to accelerate virtually all the elements in the Mendeleev table, over a wide energy range from a few MeV/nucleon to a few hundred GeV/nucleon. This makes it possible to explore collisions between these droplets of nuclear matter. These reactions are widely exploited to produce and study nuclei at stability limits. These limits can be reached by varying various parameters:

• by synthesizing (cold) nuclei far removed from the stable isotope region, the study of exotic nuclei aims to identify the range of the N/Z ratio in which the nuclei are bound;

• by rotating nuclei at very high speeds, the study of high-spin states pinpoints the angular momentum limit beyond which the nucleus fissions.

These...