Shapes and collectivity of exotic nuclei via low-energy Coulomb excitation

The way in which an atomic nucleus responds to excitations, whether by promoting individual nucleons into higher shells or by collective rotation or vibration, reveals many details of the underlying nuclear structure. The response of the nucleus is closely related to its macroscopic shape. Low-energy Coulomb excitation provides a well-understood means of exciting atomic nuclei, allowing the measurement of static and dynamic electromagnetic moments as a probe of the nuclear wavefunctions. Owing to the availability of radioactive heavy-ion beams with energies near the Coulomb barrier, it is now possible to study the shape and collectivity of short-lived nuclei far from beta stability ( the so-called exotic nuclei), providing a particularly stringent test of modern theoretical nuclear structure models. This review gives an introduction to the experimental techniques related to low-energy Coulomb excitation with radioactive ion beams and summarizes the results that were obtained over the last 10 years for a wide variety of exotic nuclei at various laboratories employing the isotope separation on-line technique.