Hello, Reader!
It’s me, Ana P., here to update you on how my IDEA Grant project has been going so far. So, I wasn’t scheduled to start working on the fission analysis project I discussed in my first blog post until mid-June, but my advisor and I have encountered a hurdle that has resulted in me no longer studying this fission of 252-Californium. There were issues in compiling the data such that it could be analyzed by the software available to me, so my advisor and I have had to shift gears into something even more exciting in my opinion!
Instead of analyzing data that has been collected already, I will be running my experiment at FSU’s Fox Laboratory this Summer. I’m still discussing with my advisor what experiments should be possible to run given the resources provided by FSU, but once I know what options I have, I will dive head-first into the literature review and prepare to experiment.
This quote from physicist Dr. Carlos A. Bertulani’s “Physics of Radioactive Beams” summarizes nuclear physics experiments best: “The study of nuclear physics demands beams of energetic particles to induce nuclear reactions on the nuclei of target atoms.” The incident particles, which are often ions in nuclear physics, are in the form of a beam, and the target is often a thin foil of a stable nucleus. Sometimes, though, the target might be a gas chamber, depending on the state of the target at room temperature.
The reason I say this is because this is the basis of experimental nuclear physics– being able to assemble a reasonable experiment based on nuclear physical principles– and I have never executed one of these experiments myself. Some of the questions one might have to answer to set up these experiments are the following: How thick should the target be? What is the lifetime of the incident particles, and can they live long enough to exist within the beam and induce a reaction with the target? What is the lifetime of the produced particles, and will they live long enough to reach the detector? Some of these questions can be answered with programs like LISE++ that have properties of all known nuclei loaded into their system. For example, I’ve included a screenshot from one of the many programs that exist within LISE++, showing that with an input of the projectile, target, and beam energy, there is an output of the compound nucleus (i.e. the projectile and the target fused) and particular energy values.
My first week of being in the lab will be the week of June 10th and I’m excited to be able to perform my experiment! If there is another obstacle that results in me not being able to run my experiment, I plan to participate in a graduate student’s collection of data and perform my separate analysis. The analysis I will do will be gamma-ray spectroscopy, as it was going to be for the fission analysis, but I will simply be studying another nuclear reaction, along with the energy and angular momentum distribution of its products.
Thank you for reading!
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