Today, a long-awaited accelerator opened that will be able to produce hundreds of isotopes never before synthesized
Credit: Facility for Rare Isotope Beams
For decades, nuclear physicists had been pushing for a facility of its power — one that could produce rare isotopes orders of magnitude faster than is possible with the NSCL and similar accelerators worldwide. The first proposals for such a machine came in the late 1980s, and consensus was reached in the 1990s. “The community was adamant that we need to get a tool like this,” says Witold Nazarewicz, a theoretical nuclear physicist and FRIB’s chief scientist.
FRIB will start operating with a relatively low beam intensity, but its accelerator will gradually ramp up to produce ions at a rate that is orders of magnitude higher than NSCL’s. Each uranium ion will also travel faster to the graphite target, carrying an energy of 200 mega-electronvolts, compared with the 140 MeV carried by ions in the NSCL.
This can happen when nuclei are bombarded with neutrons in brief but cataclysmic events, such as a supernova or the merger of two neutron stars. The most well-studied event of that type, which was observed in 2017, was consistent with models in which the colliding orbs produce elements heavier than iron. But astrophysicists could not observe which specific elements were made, or in what quantities, says Hendrik Schatz, a nuclear astrophysicist at MSU.
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