Nuclear Physics
Nuclear physics is a field that studies properties of atomic nuclei, the constituents of those nuclei, and the forces that affect them. Nuclear physics has wide practical applications, such as in nuclear power, archeological dating, biochemical labeling, smoke detectors, nuclear medicine, etc. It is also an area that touches on many aspects of fundamental physics. For example, nuclear physics provides a laboratory to study stellar evolution, nuclear stability, and the fundamental theory of strong interactions quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
Nuclear physics has a long and distinguished history at the University of Rochester. Currently, in our department, there are a number of exciting exciting research efforts in nuclear physics. On the theoretical side, Prof. Koltun studies nuclear structure, reactions at intermediate and high energies, and many-body theory. The experimental groups span a wide range of energies with their activities. Prof. Gove uses the technique of accelerator mass spectrometry for a variety of applications, including the atomic isotope dating of archeological, historical, and geological specimens. At higher energies, Prof. Cline and his group study nuclear structure at several heavy-ion facilities (ANL, LBNL, Yale) using the Gammasphere, CHICO, and YRAST detectors. They are learning about nuclei far from islands of stability, the astrophysical r-process, and collective modes such as shape and paring degrees of freedom of the nuclear many-body system. At the highest energies, the groups of Prof.'s Manly and Wolfs study relativistic heavy ion physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory with the E917 experiment at the AGS (Wolfs, Pak) and the PHOBOS experiment at RHIC (Manly, Wolfs, Pak). These experiments examine nuclear interactions at very high energy densities hoping to observe a phase transition to a new form of matter (quark-gluon plasma). Observing and quantifying such a phase transition is important for testing our model of the strong nuclear interaction and theories of the early universe. Prof. Schroeder's group studies the products of nuclear collisions using the Superball detector. The aim is to understand the dynamics of energetic collisions between complex nuclei and properties of the intermediate states formed in such collisions.
Additional efforts include a comparison of low energy neutrino and electron nucleon scattering (Profs. Bodek, Manly, and McFarland and Drs. Barbaro, Budd and Sakumoto) at Jefferson Laboratory JUPITER, Fermilab (NUMI/MINERVA) and the Japanese Hadron facility (J-PARC), and searches for Dark Matter (Prof. Ferbel, Schroeder and Wolfs).
