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2008 Florida State Physics News
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Exotic nuclei: A closer lookNSF grant will afford extraordinary opportunities to graduate studentsBy Jeffery Seay Editor in chief of STATE (The
Faculty-Staff Bulletin of Florida Sate University)
On the heels of a $4.4 million National Science Foundation grant to study nuclear reactions and structure, the Florida State University Department of Physics, along with Louisiana State University, has received a highly competitive $720,000 Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation to build a fabulous device that will create, detect and allow for the study of exotic nuclei. In fact, the FSU-LSU Array for Nuclear Astrophysics Studies with Exotic Nuclei (ANASEN) will give researchers insight into how often exotic nuclei occur to better understand how elements that are heavier than oxygen are cooked inside the cores of stars. Within an X-ray binary star system (a star similar to our sun orbiting a neutron star), an energy-generating sequence of nuclear reactions takes place. This is known as the "hot CNO cycle," in which carbon gets cooked into nitrogen, nitrogen gets cooked into oxygen and oxygen gets cooked back into carbon at tens of millions of degree. However, this cycle sometimes goes awry to produce exotic nuclei, thereby altering the nuclear reaction and enabling the creation of heavy elements, according to FSU physics Assistant Professor Grigory Rogachev, one of three researches who received the grant. Beyond the basic capability to create and observe this process, the array also will be able to perform a wide range of experiments with exotic nuclei. "Complicated chains of nuclear reactions during stellar explosions lead to the formation of heavy elements in stars," Rogachev said. "In studying the details of the stellar explosive processes, you cannot understand exactly how elements that are heavier than oxygen are cooked unless you have an accurate measure of the probability of the specific reactions." In addition to the nuclear astrophysics that it will advance, ANASEN will attract top graduate students from around the world. “This is perfect for graduate students because this kind of detector has so many kinds of particle detection techniques built into it,” Rogachev said. "They will be able to get incredible experience working on this type of experimental stuff." Rogachev’s fellow researchers are FSU physics Associate Professor Ingo Wiedenhoever and Jeff Blackmon, an associate professor of physics at LSU. "ANASEN will bring exciting new capabilities to nuclear astrophysical studies carried out using exotic beams at the John D. Fox Superconducting Laboratory here at Florida State,” said physics chairman Mark Riley, the Raymond K. Sheline Professor of Physics at FSU. “Drs. Rogachev and Wiedenhover, along with Dr. Blackmon from partner institution LSU, are to be commended for their scientific vision in designing this extremely powerful detector array and for putting together such an impressive MRI proposal to the NSF. We all look forward to the significant discoveries that this world class device will enable in the years to come." ANASEN is a multi-component "active target" detector, so named because one medium, such as helium, simultaneously serves as the target of the experiment and the active volume in which the experiment will b e conducted. Because exotic nuclei only exists for milliseconds, the device must be highly efficient to observe them. What's more, ANASEN will provide unique capabilities for state-of-the-art experiments with FSU's new radioactive nuclear beam facility, known as RESOLUT, the REsonator SOLenoid with Upscale Transmission. |
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