The GREAT spectrometer is designed to measure the properties of the reaction products transported to the focal planes of recoil separators. GREAT comprises five distinct components:

• Double Sided Silicon Strip Detectors into which the reaction products are implanted and used to measure subsequent alpha particle, beta particle or proton emission.
• An Array of Silicon PIN photodiode Detectors to measure conversion electron energies.
• A Double-sided planar Germanium strip Detector to measure the energies of X-rays, low energy gamma rays and beta particles.
• A High efficiency segmented Germanium CLOVER Detector to measure the energies of higher energy gamma rays.
• A Multiwire proportional counter this is placed in front of the silicon strip detectors to act as an active recoil discriminator.
• Total Data Readout This is a new concept that dramatically decreases the dead time of the DAQ allowing more data to be taken. This concept is discussed on the electronics pages.

The silicon strip detectors and the germanium detectors are segmented in order to enable position correlations to be made with the associated decays in the particle detectors, while the separation of the photon energy into two types of Germanium detector provides the greatest flexibility and performance.