Powerful linear accelerator could reveal rare forms of matter
A few hundred feet from where we are sitting is a large metal chamber devoid of air and covered with wires that control the instruments inside
A beam of particles passes through the interior of the chamber silently at half the speed of light until it smashes into a solid piece of material, resulting in a burst of rare isotope.
This is happening in the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, which is operated by Michigan State University for the U.S. The Energy Office of Science is a part of the Department of Energy.
National and international teams of scientists began running scientific experiments at Michigan State University in May of 2022, with the goal of creating, isolating and studying new isotopes
New insights into the fundamental nature of the universe would be provided by the experiments.
Two professors in nuclear chemistry and nuclear physics are studying rare isotopes
Some elements have the same number of protons in their nucleus but different numbers of neutrons, while others have different flavors
When it finishes ramping up to full strength, it will be the most powerful heavy-ion accelerator on Earth, even though it started working at low power
Scientists like us will be able to create and study thousands of never-before-seen isotopes as a result of the speed at which heavy ion atoms are accelerated
A community of roughly 1,600 nuclear scientists from all over the world have been waiting for a decade to begin doing science enabled by the new particle accelerator.
During the summer of 2022, the first experiments were completed.
Even though the facility is currently running at a fraction of its full power, multiple scientific collaborations have already produced and detected about 100 rare isotopes
The early results are helping researchers understand some of the most rare physics in the universe