Summer project fun!
Paul Gueye's summer student, Maya Wallach, created a fun and interesting way to display information about our research. Just click on a nucleus in the chart of the nuclides to get information about the nature of the nucleus and any of our experiments with it. Or you can play the chart like a piano. It's great fun and a novel way to display nuclear physics research.
With a Herculian effort by all the NSCL/FRIB members of the collaboration, a complex triple coincidence experiment to explore reactions leading to 12Be in the final state. The neutron-unbound nucleus 13Be is known to decay to 12Be + n with a relativley low resonance energy but previous experiments had left it unclear whether the ground state of 12Be or its 0+ isomer was populated in the final state. This leads to a significant ambiguity in constructing the level-scheme. To resolve this ambiguity, we performed a triple coincidence (fragment, neutron, and microsecond-delayed gamma-rays). This experiment was run in September of 2020 during the COVID pandemic. A small group of faculty, staff, post-doctorial researchers, and graduate students setup, ran the experiment, and packed away the devices. This invloved moving several miles of cables, a few tons of detectors, and synchronizing three distinct data acquisition system. Many thanks from the rest of the collaboration!
Undergraduate students from around the collaboration are busily at work running simulations, measuring cosmic rays, and testing different scintillating tile and SiPM layouts. They are learning all kinds of good skills from detector design to computing and making AI models fro simulations.