THE EXL EXPERIMENT AT FAIR

The upcoming FAIR facility in Darmstadt, Germany, will produce intense high energy beams of exotic nuclei, which will be used to explore the properties of new regions of the chart of nuclides of key importance for both nuclear structure and nuclear astrophysics. In the EXL project, heavy ion beams are first cooled in the New Experimental Storage Ring (NESR) and then used to induce reactions on windowless thin Hydrogen, Deuterium and Helium gas targets in the ring. High luminosities can be achieved because of the recirculation of the beam with a frequency of about 1 MHz. The EXL system will be ideal for high resolution reaction studies at low momentum transfer. The design of the detector system considered is universal in the sense that it should allow the use of a large variety of nuclear reactions, addressing numerous physics questions. The detector system provides the capability of fully exclusive kinematical measurements, with target recoil detectors, fast ejectile forward detectors and an in-ring heavy-ion spectrometer. The physics case and detector design considerations for EXL along with tests experiments performed at KVI and GSI, paving the way to the full EXL detection system, are presented in this contribution.