Institute for Structure and Nuclear Astrophysics

Michael Wiescher, Freimann Professor of Physics published the biography “Arthur E. Haas – The Hidden Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics” at Springer. A German version is being published by the LIT Verlag in Vienna. Arthur E. Haas came to ND as a professor of physics in 1936 on the recommendation of Albert Einstein. At the time, he was a well known theoretical physicist who escaped from the growing dangers of fascism in Austria/Germany to the United States to build a new life.

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Prof. Anna Simon will lead a project to develop a neutron irradiation station (NIS) at the Nuclear Science Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. NIS will utilize a high-intensity proton beam from the 5U accelerator to produce a flux of neutrons at energies up to a few MeV via nuclear reactions on low-Z targets. First of its kind in the U.S., NIS will deliver monoenergetic neutron beams with intensities of the order of 10⁸…

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Profesor Michael Wiescher, Freimann Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute for Structure and Nuclear Astrophysics (ISNAP) at the University of Notre Dame and founding director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA) received the prestigious Wolfson Fellowship of the British Royal Society.

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Samuel Henderson successfully defended his Doctoral Dissertation on June 22, 2021. The title of his thesis is "Studies of Nuclear Structure Via B(E2) Measurements in ⁷Be and ⁸Li" advised by Prof. Tan Ahn…

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Over the last few years CASPAR has driven forward with its for researching experimental plan. Work has continued through a global pandemic and underground blasting of nearby cavities. Students and faculty have pressed hard to complete crucial experiments before having to pause for extensive nearby excavations. Currently CASPAR has now been mothballed, but still has much to do.

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Orlando Gomez received the 2021 Larry O. Lamm Memorial Award in Nuclear Physics. The award is given annually to the student that was deemed to have provided the most outstanding service and dedication to the Nuclear Science Laboratory. The award recognizes Orlando’s continued efforts in sustaining and driving forward CASPAR experimental campaigns, making experimentation possible during the trying times of the COVID pandemic.…

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Nirupama Sensharma received the 2021 Cornelius P. Browne Memorial Award in Nuclear Physics for her work on wobbling motion in gold nuclei and outstanding outreach effort through her project Nuclear Energy – The Better Energy…

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In January 2021, researchers at Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab) returned a detector to the University of Notre Dame. The detector, which has been collecting data for most of 2020, is officially named the High EffiCiency TOtal absoRption spectrometer (HECTOR). During its residency at Sanford Lab in 2020, the HECTOR Detector helped researchers better understand how stars form elements. Click HERE…

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Dr. James deBoer (UND) and Dr. Michael Febbraro (ORNL) have recently lead a research initiative to make new measurements of the ¹³C(a,n)¹⁶O reaction at energies relevant for background simulations for large volume neutrino experiments. These new measurements were made possible by pairing the Notre Dame Nuclear Science Laboratory’s new high current Sta. ANA accelerator with state-of-the-art deuterated liquid scintillation detectors recently developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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Last week a team from Notre Dame, Dan Robertson and Orlando Gomez, were at the Sanford Underground Research Facility working 4850 feet underground to install HECTOR, Notre Dame’s high-efficiency, gamma-ray summing detector. The combined setup, called CASTOR, is now ready and soon be measuring alpha-capture reactions relevant for a wide and varied range of stellar burning scenarios.

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Nirupama Sensharma's publication Longitudinal Wobbling Motion in ¹⁸⁷Au was recently highlighted in Nature. Click here to see the article.

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The article below was published on February 5, 2020 on APS Physics website, written by Marric Stephens.

Synopsis: Gold Nucleus is Wobbly
A rare kind of nuclear spinning motion has been detected in an isotope of gold.

Planets, footballs, and even some large molecules have something in common: they rotate as rigid, classical bodies. Atomic nuclei are another matter, in that quantum mechanics allows strange new modes of motion. In experiments involving a short-lived isotope of gold, ¹⁸⁷…

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Adam Clark has been awarded as the first recipient of the NSL’s Applied Nuclear Fellowship (funded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission). This fellowship was created in 2019 for the purpose of training students in applied nuclear physics and is awarded to senior graduate students who exhibit a clear interest in applied research with broad applications.

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Nuclear Physics Professors Ani Aprahamian, Manoel Couder, James deBoer, Daniel Robertson and Anna Simon as well as research associate Dr. Xilu Wang and a fifth year graduate student Erika Holmbeck presented their research at the 9th Nuclear Physics in Astrophysics conference that took place from September 15^th to 20^th in Budenheim, Germany. 

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Professor Maxime Brodeur, Janet Weikel from the Nuclear Science Laboratory of the University of Notre Dame, and Professor Thomas Brunner from McGill University co-organized the 13th International Conference on the Stopping and Manipulation of Ions (SMI-2019)…

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A team of faculty from the Nuclear Science Laboratory, Daniel Robertson, Manoel Couder, Anna Simon and Joachim Goerres, led by Michael Wiescher received 4-year support from the NSF to continue measurements at the underground accelerator facility investigating reactions important for the stellar nucleosynthesis processes.

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Patricia Huestis has won an award from the DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program. This supplemental award is given to outstanding U.S. graduate students to pursue part of their graduate thesis research at a DOE laboratory. Patricia will spend the summer of 2019 working at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory under the guidance of Drs. Sue Clark and Greg Kimmel.

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Prof. Ani Aprahamian dubbed "Avengers 4" proton cannon wildly impractical to defeat "Thanos". Click here to read the full article.…

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Professor Michael Wiescher, Freimann Professor of Physics and the Director of the Nuclear Science Laboratory co-organized the workshop “Nuclear Processes in Dense Plasmas” held at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.…

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Nirupama Sensharma has been selected to be in the Leadership Advancing Socially Engaged Research (LASER) program for academic year 2018-19. LASER…

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The Nuclear Science Laboratory hosted an open house on Friday, April 6th as part of the 80th anniversary celebration of the nuclear physics program at Notre Dame. Click here…

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JINA-CEE has continued a successful initiative to help Boy Scouts earn their Nuclear Science Merit badges at ISNAP.  18 scouts attended a workshop on January 20th with their parents. Graduate student Bryce Frentz served as Merit Badge Counselor and was joined by two Notre Dame physics majors in leading the activities

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The University of Michigan's Applied Nuclear Science Group, led by Professor Igor Jovanovic, visited the University of Notre Dame last week to perform a series of experiments using the FN Tandem accelerator. The experiments centered around the acceleration of deuterons into a boron-11 target, which produces unique high-energy neutrons and gamma-rays. This reaction was in turn used as a mixed-particle interrogation source in conjunction with a variety of detection systems, including organic, inorganic, and semi-conductor detectors.

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Ani Aprahamian, the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Physics, and Yuri Oganessian, chairman of the international scientistic board of the Alikhanian National Science Laboratory met with the President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan on November 6. Aprahamian and Oganessian were invited to attend the World Conference in Yerevan. The Armenian President was highly appreciative of their continued contribution to physics and mathematics progression as well as educating the next generation of future scientists. To read the full article, please click here…

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As part of continued support for the JINA R-matrix code AZURE2, a workshop was held at the Institute of Modern Physics (Chinese Academy of Sciences) in Lanzhou, China from September 18^th to 22^nd. Dr. James deBoer presented lectures and tutorials that emphasized the practical use of the code.

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The goal of this Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant was to modify the low energy injection system of the FN tandem electrostatic accelerator of the Nuclear Science Laboratory (NSL) at the University of Notre Dame (ND) to provide higher mass resolution necessary for improved isotopic selectivity at isotopic masses beyond sulfur and chlorine. 

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CASPAR researchers Daniel Robertson and Michael Wiescher have been featured in the Autumn 2017 issue of the Notre Dame Magazine written by Dr. Kenneth Garcia '08 about his personal experience of going underground in the Homestake Mine of South Dakota where CASPAR is located. The online version of the article can be found here…

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The NSL faculty retreat for 2017 took place at Fernwood Botanical Garden in Niles, MI on August 26. The group discussed current issues and strategic short-term and long-range plans on scientific focuses and resources for the Nuclear Science Laboratory.…

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The Ph. D. thesis of Dr. James Matta, titled "Exotic Nuclear Excitations: The Transverse Wobbling Mode in ¹³⁵Pr" has been published as a book by the well-known science publisher Springer under the "Springer Theses" series. 

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The Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research (CASPAR) is featured in the science section of WIRED magazine.

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