News: With great sorrow to report 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, as well as both proton-rich and neutron-rich nuclei, that are 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 at Argonne, ReA3/NSCL at Michigan State, TRIUMF/ISACII in Canada, and REX-ISOLDE at CERN 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 CHICO2 heavy-ion detector with Gammasphere and GRETINA at ATLAS/CARIBU, the LLNL/Rochester Bambino detector with TIGRESS γ-ray tracking array at TRIUMF/ISACII, a Bambino style heavy-ion detector coupled to SeGA γ-ray array used by the JANUS collaboration at ReA3/NSCL, and MINIBALL at CERN/ISOLDE. Some of the experimental techniques being used were pioneered by this group including the GOSIA Coulomb excitation least-squares search codes which is used to analyse Coulomb excitation data. Development and maintenance of the CHICO2 and Bambino heavy-ion detectors, plus development and community support of the Gosia suite of codes, are major contributions that this group continues to provide to the nuclear science research community.
This webpage provides links to descriptions of the science, facilities, techniques, detectors and productivity of this research program.
Page created and maintained by Doug Cline. Last updated 20 January 2017.