Coulomb excitation experiments have been used for many years for the study of electromagnetic properties of nuclear states. With low energy heavy ions one can make sure that one has pure electromagnetic interaction between projectile and target nuclei by keeping the bombarding energy below the Coulomb barrier. For relativistic heavy ions, pure Coulomb excitation may be distinguished from nuclear reactions by demanding extreme forward scattering or avoiding those collisions in which violent reactions take place.
The preformed RISING (Rare Isotope Investigations at GSI) experiments exploited secondary unstable beams at relativistic energies in the range from 100 MeV/u to 400 MeV/u. The exotic beams were used for Coulomb excitation experiments in order to obtain important nuclear structure observables with γ-ray spectroscopic methods. The experimental methods, data analysis and results will be discussed in detail.
The future experiments for the first PreSPEC campaign will also be discussed which focus on shell structure of exotic doubly magic nuclei and their vicinity as well as shapes and shape coexistence