Nuclear Structure of Exotic Nuclei

University Of Rochester, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

The primary goal of this proposed research program is to provide the evidence needed to develop improved theories that will have strong predictive power throughout the nuclear landscape from stable to the limits of stability. The research will exploit the premier new radioactive beam facilities, namely the US ATLAS-CARIBU facility at Argonne, and the Canadian TRIUMF/ISAC2 facility in order to probe unusual nuclear structure phenomena in unexplored regions of nuclei far from stability. In addition, studies will be made of exotic isomeric states, such as long lived "K" isomers, that have unusually simple shell configurations which provide an ideal testing ground of mean fields and residual interactions as well as for elucidating the role of the K quantum number in nuclear structure. The research at ATLAS will exploit the Rochester heavy-ion detector CHICO, plus Gammasphere, this nation's premier high-resolution gamma-ray facility. The Rochester/LLNL Bambino heavy-ion detector system will be used with the new TIGRESS high-resolution tracking gamma-ray facility at ISAC2. The important developments of CHICO and Bambino, as well as contributions to Gammasphere, GRETA, and the techniques of Coulomb excitation, heavy-ion induced transfer, and fission-fragment spectroscopy, are the culmination of many years of effort at Rochester. A new generation heavy-ion detector, SuperCHICO will be developed in order to achieve the ultimate resolution with the next generation high-resolution gamma-ray tracking detector systems GRETA and TIGRESS. Such detector systems will provide a resolving power that is orders of magnitude better than currently available, enabling studies that at present are inaccessible to nuclear science. Besides having an enormous impact on nuclear science, the potential impact of such gamma-ray tracking and imaging detectors will be considerable to a wide range of applications, including astrophysics, medicine, industry, and nuclear safeguards. The proposed research and detector development programs are an ideal environment for graduate and post-doctoral education.