RAON is the first heavy-ion accelerator facility in Korea, whose construction was initiated along with the establishment of the Institute for Basic Science in 2011. Completed in 2022, the facility produced first radioactive isotopes in 2023. RAON is designed to host both the ISOL and in-flight fragmentation sections for production of the rarest isotopes in the nuclear chart.
In March 2024, the first Program Advisory Committee meeting was held to provide domestic users with beam time for physics experiments. One of the approved experiments is “Coulomb excitation of 181Ta and 197Au with 40Ar” at a beam energy of ~3.5 MeV per nucleon, aimed at commissioning the domestic Si and HPGe detector systems and measuring spectroscopic quadrupole moments of excited states in 197Au. The experiment is scheduled to start in August 2024.
The physics motivation and preparation status of the experiment will be presented, along with a general introduction of RAON and its prospects.