Anna Simon-Robertson

Orlando Gomez, a third-year graduate student working in the Nuclear Science Laboratory with Prof. Anna Simon, received the Glenn T. Seaborg Institute at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory “Nuclear Forensics Summer Internship”. The internship provides a stipend and travel cost reimbursement for a graduate student who is then paired with an LLNL scientist for a two-month program. The student joins the research group at LLNL and works on a project directly related to the efforts of the group.

Link to the Department of Physics article.

In April this year, my group joined the Center of Excellence CENTAUR funded by National Nuclear Security Administration at Texas A&M. Through the center, we will continue our work with the HYPERION array at the Texas A&M cyclotron to investigate the statistical properties of rare-earth nuclei. Such measurements provide constraints for the neutron capture cross sections for nuclear astrophysics (s- and r-processes) and for applications (reactor physics, stockpile stewardship, national security).

More information can be found here: https://news.nd.edu/news/training-the-next-generation-of-leaders-in-low-energy-nuclear-physics/ and in the Texas A&M press release: http://www.science.tamu.edu/news/story.php?story_ID=2006#.W2oMoP5KhE4

Emily Churchman from Texas Lutheran University joined our group this summer as an REU student. Emily is working with HECTOR, participated in (p,γ) and (α,γ) measurements earlier this month and now is analyzing 102Pd(p,g)103Ag reaction data to extract the cross section for p-process nucleosynthesis.

Jack Wurzer presented a poster on his analysis of HECTOR’s efficiency during the College of Science Joint Annual Meeting (COS JAM) on May 4th, 2018.

During the week of November 20, 2017, Nathan, Craig and myself went to Texas A&M to perform an experiment using the Hyperion array. With twelve clover detectors for gamma-rays and a deltaE-E telescope for particle id and energy, we measured (p,d) and (p,t) reactions for rare earth targets.

The data will be utilized to extract statistical properties of the compound nuclei formed during the reaction using the Oslo method.

The sixth p-process Workshop was held at the University of Notre Dame, June 29 – July 1, 2017. 35 participants from Europe and U.S. joined the meeting to talk about the recent progress in computational, experimental and theoretical efforts to understand the astrophysical p-process.

The presentations from the meeting were commented on live via twitter! https://twitter.com/hashtag/pprocess2017?src=hash

More information about the workshop can be found here: https://pprocess2017.nd.edu/

Joe Arroyo from Illinois Institute of Technology joined our group this summer as an REU student. During his second week, he took nightshifts for the experiment with HECTOR and learned how to operate a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator.

His summer project was to figure out the efficiency of HECTOR after few modifications to the target holder. Joe also modeled the detection system in Geant4 and obtained results that agreed with the experiment! We will be using his simulation in the future to analyze cross section data.

In October, Matthew went to Vancouver to present the results of his work at the Fall Meeting of the Division of Nuclear Physics of APS. His poster was also selected for presentation during the public event at the TRIUMF research facility.

Farheen Naqvi has joined our group as a postdoctoral researcher. Formely at MSU and Yale, Farheen has worked in nuclear structure and astrophysics and will be working with the students helping them with data analysis.

Our group’s research has been granted a four-year funding from National Science Foundation. The grant provides salaries for the students and funds for isotopically enriched target materials that will be used for experiments with HECTOR.