Our mission is to support US-based senior experimental Postdocs and finishing graduating PhD students in the low-energy nuclear physics field who are about to take the next step in their careers. Due to the COVID-19 situation, junior people are currently being robbed of the opportunity to travel to conferences, show their work, and meet and …
Category Archive: News
Jul 01
REU 2020 goes online!
The global pandemic of 2020 does not stop the REU program. Several students across the US joined the ND-REU program and are working remotely, on data analysis, simulations and modeling. Cassidy Favorite from Hendrix College and Ryan Buechele from Case Western Reserve University joined my group this summer to work on Geant4 simulations for the …
Feb 19
HECTOR ready for experiments a mile underground
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 …
Nov 06
HECTOR underground: Tessa presents her work at the CUSE Undergraduate Research and Experiential Learning Showcase
Tessa Klein, a physics junior, has been working on Geant4 simulations for HECTOR that will help our group understand the structure of the background in our data that is generated by cosmic muons. She is exploring the possibility to include veto detectors around HECTOR to reduce the background and, recently, started simulations of HECTOR performance …
Nov 01
Patrick and Sean presented their work at the COS-JAM event
Patrick and Sean were both selected to give oral presentations at the COS-JAM event. Patrick discussed the work that formed his Honor Thesis: proton capture reaction on 108Cd, one of the p-nuclei. The goal of the work was to constrain the cross section to better understand the production of Cd isotopes by the p-process during …
Nov 01
HECTOR is joining the CASPAR team.
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. The Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research (CASPAR), undertakes National ScienceFoundation (NSF) funded research at …
Nov 01
Sean presents his research at the CEU event
Sean Kelly presented the results of his work as an REU student at Notre Dame during a Conference Experience for Undergraduates at the APS DNP meeting that took place in Crystal City, VA. Sean is using the data from HECTOR’s commissioning run to understand the level scheme of 28Si and figure out the origin of …
Nov 12
Sean presents his research at the University of Notre Dame Undergraduate Research and Experiential Learning Showcase
Sean Kelly and undergradute who is currently analyzing data from our last HECTOR experiment, presented a poster at the University of Notre Dame Undergraduate Research and Experiential Learning Showcase. Sean talked about the p-process nucleosynthesis and details of the gamma-ray summing technique.
Nov 09
Rebeka receives award for poster presentation at AWIS
Rebeka presented her work at the conference organized by the Association for Women in Science Notre Dame Chapter. Her poster on the p-process nucleosynthesis was ranked third in the “Best poster competition”! Click here to read more: https://physics.nd.edu/news/graduate-students-receive-awards-at-awis-regional-conference/
Sep 13
Craig spends summer at LLNL
Craig Reingold, fourth-year graduate student in the Nuclear Science Laboratory working with the group of Prof. Anna Simon, spent ten weeks in summer 2018 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He joined the Academic Cooperation Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which hosts up to 800 undergraduate and graduate students each year. The program is designed to encourage external collaborations with …