My Area of Research


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My past and current research programme consists of nuclear structure studies very far from stability, mainly with radioactive ion beams. I contribute to the exciting developments in this field, which the new equipment being designed and built throughout Europe make possible. SPIRAL in Caen, France, is the facility where my current research activities are focused. However, I also make use of other existing facilities around the world.

Nuclear structure studies have acquired a new dimension as a result of the recent availability of high-energy radioactive ion beams produced via projectile-fragmentation techniques. New regions of the nuclear chart far from the valley of beta-stability can, for the first time, be explored in order to search for new phenomena in these nuclei, which have very exotic neutron number (N) to proton number (Z) ratios. It also allows stringent tests of the predictive power of nuclear models to be made, models that were designed to reproduce and understand the properties of stable nuclei. Studying unstable nuclei is also crucial to understand and describe the processes of nucleosynthesis in astrophysics.

Very recently high-intensity and high-quality beams of low-energy radioactive ions have become available at facilities such as SPIRAL (GANIL, France) and REX-ISOLDE (CERN, Switzerland) in Europe. These beams will allow us to study reactions with lower cross-sections, to go even farther from stability and most importantly to use reaction mechanisms that are dominant at Coulomb barrier energies such as fusion or nucleon-transfer reactions. These reactions are presently unreachable but are the best tools to understand nuclear structure.

With the new SPIRAL accelerator, fusion-evaporation reactions will allow us to reach nuclei that have not been accessible up-to-now. Decay-studies of these nuclei will give spectroscopic information when determining their level schemes from their half-lives, excited-state energies and branching ratios. New experiments will, for instance, allow us to probe the entirely new structure of nuclei that have their levels in the continuum and should bring crucial information to improve present models. For nuclei close to the proton drip-line (i.e. the frontiers of bound neutron-deficient nuclei), exotic decay-modes are predicted such as the beta-delayed emission of one or more protons or an alpha-particle via the isobaric analog state, or of two protons from the ground state.

The EXOGAM gamma-ray spectrometer, currently being built by a large European collaboration including the University of Liverpool, used together with charged-particle detectors, will be the key tool for these types of studies. Elastic and inelastic scattering reactions as well as nucleon-transfer reactions are promising for the study of matter distributions in exotic nuclei, deformations, modifications of shell-structure far from stability, the behaviour of giant resonances versus proton-neutron asymmetry, etc. These experiments will be performed with the new large-acceptance VAMOS spectrometer, currently under construction at SPIRAL, used in coincidence with light charged-particle multidetectors such as MUST, TIARA, GREAT. Bringing these ambitious new projects at SPIRAL and elsewhere to fruition will certainly be a major experimental challenge.
 

SIRIUS Science booklet


GANIL & SPIRAL, Caen (France)
               SPIRAL - a new facility for the production and acceleration of radioactive ion beams at GANIL

GSI, Darmstadt (Germany)

University of Jyväskylä (Finland)

NSCL/Michigan State University, East Lansing (USA)
 


in Europe:
SPIRAL II/LINAG, France
GSI future facility project, Germany
EURISOL

in North America:
RIA
 

Browse recent Nuclear Physics research news on the Liverpool Nuclear Physics Group webpage.




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maintained by Marielle Chartier

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