Welcome to FRIB
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU) is a world-class research and training center, hosting the most powerful rare-isotope accelerator. MSU operates FRIB as a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC), with financial support from and furthering the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. FRIB is where researchers come together to make discoveries that change the world. They study the properties and fundamental interactions of rare isotopes and nuclear astrophysics and their impact on medicine, homeland security, and industry.
Research areas
FRIB advances nuclear science by improving our understanding of nuclei and their role in the universe, while also advancing accelerator systems.
Capabilities
In establishing and operating FRIB, capabilities were developed that transfer to other industries and applications.
User facilities
FRIB hosts the world’s most powerful heavy-ion accelerator and enables discoveries in rare isotopes, nuclear astrophysics, fundamental interactions, and societal applications like medicine, security, and industry.
Learn more about upcoming events taking place at FRIB.
Note that this seminar will take place at 9am Eastern Time / 3 pm CET Abstract: In recent years, CubeSats, a class of small satellites consisting of several 10-cm cubic units, have been increasingly employed in astronomical missions. In X-ray astronomy, celestial sources must be observed from space to avoid attenuation of X-ray photons by the Earth's atmosphere. As a result, the advantages of CubeSats (such as their low cost and short development times) are gaining wider recognition, leading to an increasing number of CubeSat missions being planned. NinjaSat is the first Japanese 6U CubeSat observatory designed to observe bright X-ray sources, such as black holes and neutron stars. It was launched on November 11, 2023, by the SpaceX Transporter-9 mission and observed 32 X-ray sources during its two-year operation. We successfully demonstrated that CubeSat observations can provide valuable astronomical X-ray data, highlighting NinjaSat's pioneering role as a compact yet uniquely powerful observatory in time-domain astronomy. In this talk, I present an overview of NinjaSat, including the development of the gas X-ray detector, which is one of the most suitable choices for CubeSat applications, and student-led in-orbit operations. In addition, I present observational results of X-ray bursters, which are thought to be key sites for the production of proton-rich heavy nuclei.
Particle accelerators continue to grow in complexity, requiring tighter tolerances and better tuning methods. Light sources are an especially demanding case due to strict requirements on beam uptime and stability. Recently, machine learning (ML) methods like Bayesian optimization and reinforcement learning have shown promise for experimentally finding and maintaining optimum states. However, a lot of preparation and development is required to use ML tools effectively. In this talk, we will review the commissioning of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) facility, which has just completed an upgrade to become one of the world's brightest storage-ring light sources. We will then dive into details of ML use-cases such as first stored beam search, lattice optics inference, and multi-objective (MO) tuning of injection efficiency and lifetime. MO tuning is an especially interesting high-dimensionality task that was previously intractable with classic optimization methods. We will highlight novel Bayesian optimization algorithm and methodology improvements, and show results of several experimental optimization runs up to 24 dimensions, benchmarking efficiency as compared to standard genetic algorithms. We will conclude with an overview of ongoing ML applications at other facilities, and a discussion of integration into standard control room toolkits.
Education & training
FRIB at MSU is a world-class research and training center where students and researchers from all career stages and backgrounds come together to make discoveries that change the world.
External news and journal publications discussing FRIB.
One of the nation's premier research facilities located at Michigan State University is getting a multi-million dollar upgrade. Late last month, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science approved $49.7 million for MSU's Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.
A team of scientists, including researchers from FRIB, published an article in Nature Physics on how research on neutron-rich nuclei shows that in the so-called islands of inversion, they are deformed rather than spherical in their ground states.
Scientists and engineers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) have reached a new milestone in isotope studies. They accelerated a high-power beam of uranium ions and delivered a record 10.4 kilowatts of continuous beam power to a target. The work is published in the journal Physical Review Accelerators and Beams.
