  BlueSTEAl, the Blue (aluminum chamber of) Silicon TElescope Arrays for light
nuclei,has been developed to study direct reactions in inverse kinematics, as
well as scattering and breakup reactions using radioactive ion beams. It is a
detector system consisting of a pair of annular silicon detector arrays and a
zero-degree phoswich plastic scintillator. For typical binary reaction studies
in inverse kinematics, light ions are detected by the Si array in coincidence
with heavy recoils detected by the phoswich placed at the focal-plane of a
zero-degree magnetic spectrometer. The Si array can also be used to detect
light nuclei such as berylium and carbon with clear isotope separation, while
the phoswich can also be placed at zero degrees without a spectrometer and used
as a high-efficiency beam counting monitor with particle identification
capability at the rate of up to 5*10^4 particles per second. This paper reports
on the capabilities of BlueSTEAl as determined by recent experiments performed
at the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute. The device is also anticipated to be used
in future experiments at other radioactive ion beam facilities.
