As part of the Notre Dame International Security Center (NDISC), Profs. Mike Desch, Dan Lindley, and Dan Bardayan lead annual Spring Break student trips to visit sites of National Security Interest. NDISC seeks to educate exceptional undergraduate students in the area of international security, broadly defined. This purpose of the trip is twofold: 1) To expose students to the history of the nuclear age through direct immersion in one of the central foci of the development of U.S. nuclear weapons 2) To expose students to the state-of-the-art facilities and capabilities that exist at national defense related sites. …
Freimann Professor of Physics Ani Aprahamian was invited to take part in the 131st session of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Reactions (JINR) Scientific Council in Dubna (Russian Federation) on February 23-25, 2022. The science council was examining the 7-year development plans of the main laboratories of JINR which include Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics, and Condensed Matter Physics.
The 2022 Cornelius P. Browne Memorial Award in Nuclear Physics is shared between two graduate students. Orlando Olivas-Gomez was recognized for his work on searching for branching points in the p-process nucleosynthesis path, and August Gula for the measurements of nuclear reaction processes of interest for first stellar burning.…
Adam Clark received the 2022 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 Adam’s work and dedication to the maintenance and operations of the SNICS source and the FN accelerator.…
On February 7,2022, John T. Wilkinson successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Novel Nuclear Reactions for Medical and Environmental Applications” advised by Professor Graham Peaslee.
Congratulations to Orlando Olivas-Gomez for successfully defending his Doctoral Dissertation on February 3, 2022. His thesis titled "CONSTRAINING THE γ-PROCESS USING HECTOR" advised by Professor Anna Simon-Robertson…
Frank M. Freimann Professor of Physics Ani Aprahamian was the keynote speaker at the Armenian American Medical Society's 35th Anniversary Gala held at Universal City, in California on November 20, 2021. Aprahamian serves the director of A. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory of Armenia. At the gala Professor Aprahamian was also honored for her outstanding leadership and dedication in expanding the capacity of the scientific and healthcare sectors of the Republic of Armenia. “The Cryogen Center/Oxygen Generator project was one of the largest projects the AAMS has ever funded,” said Garni Barkhoudarian, MD, FAAP. “Professor Aprahamian was the person responsible for this project. Because of her, Armenia now has enough liquid oxygen for the entire country in all sectors for at least fifty years. We couldn’t think of a more deserving recipient.”…
Daniel Burdette successfully defended his Doctoral Dissertation on November 4, 2021. The title of his thesis is "Precision tests of the standard model at low energy via nuclear beta decay." advised by Professor Maxime Brodeur…
The elements that make up our world were produced in various astrophysical environments. Some are produced in the cores of stars and some in violent cataclysmic explosions such as supernovae. Notre Dame researchers have now unlocked a key piece of a puzzle in understanding how some rare-earth nuclei, such as Mo and Ru, are produced in the cosmos. Among supernovae researchers, there has been a long-standing debate on whether the production of elements heavier than Cu is terminated by what is called the Ni-Cu cycle. This new experimental result hints that this is not actually the case, as it found that the (p,α) reaction that produces the isotope 56…
Freimann Professor Ani Aprahamian has been elected as one of five Vice Presidents of the General Council of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
IUPAP representation in the USA is carried out by the Science Academies. The aims of IUPAP with 60 member countries from across the world are:…
Professor Ani Aprahamian has been elected to become the Chair of the IUPAP Commission on Nuclear Physics (C12). She replaces Professor Claes Faehlander of the University of Lund in Sweden. The commission that she chairs works closely with the OECD efforts globally.…
Scott Carmichael, a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, was one of 65 graduate students selected to receive world-class training through the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Research (SCGSR) program.
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.
Professor Dan Bardayan received a Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct research on nuclear astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame’s Nuclear Science Laboratory.
With the $505,000 grant to be matched with $217,000 from the University, Bardayan will develop a nuclear decay spectrometer called SABRE, the Silicon Array for Branching Ratio Experiments. SABRE will take advantage of the unique TriSol facility at the Nuclear Science Lab to measure proton and alpha branching ratios as small as one part in one-hundred thousand, which is characteristic of many important resonances of astrophysical interest. …
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…
The research of several Notre Dame Physics faculty members and graduate students resulted in a recently published article in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Journal (Irradiation-Driven Restructuring of UO2 Thin Films: Amorphization and Crystallization Vol 13, pp. 35153–35164, 2021) on the preparation, characterization and irradiation stability of thin UO2…
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…