My research interests include heavy-ion reaction mechanisms, reactions with radioactive beams, and nuclear astrophysics, and South Bend is an excellent location for pursuing this research. Notre Dame's Nuclear Structure Laboratory, with it's three electrostatic accelerators, TwinSol radioactive beam line and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA), is just across town, and the world-class accelerator facilities of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State and the ATLAS facility at Argonne National Laboratory are both within easy driving distance.
Notre Dame was
the site of one of the first radioactive beam facilities in
the U.S. The current radioactive beamline, TwinSol, consists of a pair
of superconducting solenoids that act as magnetic lenses to focus short-lived
nuclei, produced by reactions of stable nuclei with a primary target, onto a
secondary target. I have collaborated in a series of experiments over the
last several years to explore the mechanisms of reactions of 6He
with heavy targets such as 209Bi, as well as experiments with a
number of other neutron-rich light nuclei.
IUSB is a member
of the MoNA collaboration, a consortium of Michigan State
University, Florida State University, and eight primarily undergraduate
institutions that undertook construction and initial testing of the Modular
Neutron Array (MoNA), a highly efficient neutron detection wall for use at
the NSCL. Two IUSB physics majors assembled and tested one of MoNA's nine
layers of scintillator detectors at IUSB. The first test of MoNA in tandem
with the NSCL's new sweeper magnet, in July 2004, was a great success. Two
of the first experiments using MoNA, already approved, will be a search for
a 2+ excited state of 24O and an investigation of the
12Be ground state.
My work in nuclear astrophysics has included experiments at Notre Dame, at the University of Toronto (using the JN Van de Graaff accelerator subsequently moved to Notre Dame), at the NSCL, and at Louvain-la-Neuve. The experiment at Toronto was a measurement of the lifetime of an excited state of 37K, the experiment at the NSCL a measurement of the 44Ti lifetime, and the experiment at Louvain-la-Neuve a measurement of the alpha-branching ratios of a number of states in 19Ne, as a way to study indirectly the reaction 15O(α,γ)19Ne. At Notre Dame I collaborated in a high-resolution measurement of α+12C elastic scattering angular distributions, as an indirect way to study the reaction 12C(α,γ)16O at helium-burning energies. IUSB is affiliated with JINA as a "Participating College".
Nuclear physics research at IUSB has been supported by the National Science Foundation, grants PHY-0072314 and PHY-0132567.
Selected publications