News: With great sorrow it is announced that Tomasz Czosnyka died on Thursday 19 October 2006 after a long battle with cancer. See the Warsaw Heavy-Ion Laboratory announcement.
Research goals and techniques
Many hundreds of unexplored nuclear isotopes lie in the neutron rich "terra incognita" far from stability. Nuclei at this frontier exhibit surprising features such as changes in shell structure, haloes of low density neutron matter, and new modes of excitation. Development of improved mean field theories of the nucleus that have strong predictive power throughout the nuclear landscape from stable to the limits of stability are essential to the understanding of nuclear structure, nuclear astrophysics, and to many applications of nuclear science. The primary goal of the program is to provide the evidence needed to develop such improved theories. Studies of nuclear structure in stable and neutron-rich nuclei far from stability are being performed up to high angular momentum in order to map the evolution of shell structure and collective modes with increasing neutron richness and spin. A second approach involves studies of exotic isomeric states that have unusually simple shell configurations providing an ideal testing ground of mean fields and residual interactions.
The research uses both stable and radioactive beams from the new heavy-ion accelerator facilities, ATLAS/CARIBU and TRIUMF/ISACII in Canada, to populate nuclei throughout the nuclear landscape. This research exploits the enormous advance in detection efficiency, sensitivity and selectivity provided by the latest generation 4π γ-ray detector arrays to study the properties of exotic nuclear states. This sensitivity is absolutely crucial for study of the especially interesting nuclei at the margins of extreme proton/neutron ratios because of the weak beam intensities available at these limits. This detection sensitivity is greatly enhanced by coupling 4π heavy-ion detector arrays that we have developed and operate as important auxiliary detectors facilities with these 4π γ-ray detector arrays. These are, the Rochester CHICO heavy-ion detector with Gammasphere at ATLAS/CARIBU, and the LLNL/Rochester Bambino detector with TIGRESS γ-ray tracking array at TRIUMF/ISACII. Some of the experimental techniques being used were pioneered by this group. This prior expertise plus the development of 4π arrays of heavy-ion detectors and γ-ray detectors, and their operation for the research community remain important contributions of this group to nuclear science that have applications to other scientific fields and education.
This webpage provides links to descriptions of the science, facilities, techniques, detectors and productivity of this research program. This program continues in close collaboration with Dr. C.Y. Wu who moved from Rochester to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005.
Page created and maintained by Doug Cline. Last updated 3 April 2008.