Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

TBD

Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime that travel to us from some of the most extreme events in our Universe, distant mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Observations of these events chart the history of stars through the collapsed remnants that are left behind at the end of their lives. Interpreting the patterns of their waves tells us about how these compact remnants orbit and spin, and can tell us how matter behaves at densities beyond that of an atomic nucleus. Mergers involving neutron stars are engines of transient astronomy, launching gamma-ray bursts and spreading newly created heavy elements into the universe. In this talk, I will tell some of the story of this new field of gravitational wave astronomy and show how our first detections are laying the groundwork for future observatories that can see across our entire Universe. Jocelyn Read is a Professor of Physics at California State University Fullerton in the Nicholas and Lee Begovich Center for Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy, and currently a Visiting Fellow at the Perimeter Institute. Her research connects the nuclear astrophysics of neutron stars with gravitational wave observations. She earned her Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, where she developed a widely used model for dense matter inside neutron stars and produced first estimates of how gravitational waves from neutron star mergers would inform these properties. Her work has included proposed mechanisms for precursor flares in gamma-ray bursts, new methods for gravitational-wave cosmology, uncertainty quantification for neutron-star merger source modeling, and measurements of dense matter properties with LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave observations. She is actively contributing to the development of the next-generation gravitational-wave observatory Cosmic Explorer. Read co-chaired the LIGO/Virgo Binary Neutron Star Sources Working Group from 2014 to 2016 and was part of the team awarded the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of gravitational waves. She co-led the Extreme Matter team of the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra Collaboration from 2016 to 2022, through the first discovery and analysis of gravitational waves from a neutron-star merger. She has held visiting positions at the California Institute of Technology and the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena. Read chairs the Advisory Board for the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) and served on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2019.

Nuclear reactions among charged particles in stars take place at energies generally well below the Coulomb barrier, so the Coulomb barrier penetration factor exponentially suppresses the cross sections down to values as small as few nanobarns or picobarns. Therefore, approaching astrophysical energies opens new challenges and calls for new approaches. I will introduce the mission of nuclear astrophysics and discuss how experiments are usually conducted. Then, I will focus on the use of indirect methods as complementary approaches to direct measurements, discussing in detail the asymptotic normalization coefficient (ANC) and the Trojan Horse Method (THM). These methods are used to deduce the astrophysical factors of reactions with photons and charged particles in the exit channel, respectively, with no need of extrapolation. I will present recent results of the application of the two methods as examples. First, I will discuss the 6Li(3He,d)7Be measurement used to deduced the ANC’s of the 3He+4He->7Be and p+6Li->7Be channels and the corresponding radiative capture astrophysical factors. Then, I will illustrate the THM measurement of the 27Al(p,a)24Mg astrophysical factor through the 2H(27Al,a24Mg)n reaction. The reaction rate of the 27Al(p,g)28Si reaction was also deduced thanks to the determination of the proton partial widths. Both the ANC and the THM applications made it possible to assess the occurrence or exclude the presence of resonances that could be responsible significant changes of the reaction rates at temperatures of astrophysical interest.

Program: Soirées musicales (Gioachino Rossini, 1792-1868) - La pastorella dell’Alpi - Il rimprovero - L’invito Sieben Frühe Lieder (Alban Berg, 1885-1935) - Nacht - Schilflied - Die Nachtigall - Traumgekrönt - Im Zimmer - Liebesode - Sommertage Intermission Mélodies persanes, Op. 26 (Saint Saëns, 1810-1849) - La Brise - La Splendeur vide - La solitaire A tí (Jaime León, 1921-2015) Sabor a mí (Alvaro Carrillo, 1921-1969) Júrame (Maria Grever, 1885-1951) Paula Duva-Rodriguez is a Colombian American mezzo-soprano pursuing her Masters of Music in the studio of Jane Bunnell at Michigan State University (MSU). Ms. Duva-Rodriguez recently completed her final opera at MSU, singing the title role of La Cenerentola. Ms. Duva-Rodriguez first gained notice for her “warm and powerful voice” backed by her “Chaplinesque” performance as Ramiro in La finta giardiniera (MSU Opera Theatre). Other roles in Ms. Duva-Rodriguez’s repertory include Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Mrs. Segstom in A Little Night Music, La tasse chinoise/La libellule in L’enfant et les sortilèges, Nancy in Albert Herring, Dritte Dame in Die Zauberflöte, and Cherubino in Act II of Le nozze di Figaro. Concert repertory includes Alto Soloist positions for Handel’s Messiah, (Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra), Schubert’s Magnificat (GLCO), Rutter’s Gloria (People’s Church of East Lansing) and Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli (PCEL). Ms. Duva-Rodriguez was also a recipient of the Mezzo-Soprano Prize, sponsored by Hilda Harris at the 2024 George Shirley competition. Ms. Duva-Rodriguez dabbles in other music adventures, having been a vocalist for MSU’s salsa band Salsa Verde and a jazz combo vocalist at MSU, along with having played saxophone for several years. Paula Duva-Rodriguez completed her Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Arts in English at Michigan State University.

A Quark-Gluon Plasma is the state of matter that existed a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. The temperatures were about a million times hotter than that of our sun. At these extremely hot temperatures, atoms and nuclei melt into a soup of quarks and gluons. We can study this state in modern accelerators by colliding heavy nuclei, such as gold or lead, at ultrarelativistic energies. One way to study this plasma is by studying its effect on particles made of a heavy quark-antiquark pair. The heaviest of these are states made of b and anti-b quarks, sometimes called "beauty" quarks. In this talk, we will summarize measurements taken over the past 15 years, we have studied these particles as they experience the hot environment of the Quark-Gluon Plasma, where we have found that these particles essentially melt when they are placed in this extreme environment. Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez is from Mexico City. He went to high-school and college in at the Tec de Monterrey, majoring in Engineering Physics. He spent a summer doing research at CERN through a fellowship from the Mexican Physical Society. Thanks to this he continued on to graduate school to pursue his Ph.D, joining the relativistic heavy-ion group at Yale University, where he completed his PhD in 2001 in the field of high-energy nuclear physics. His work was done at the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was first a postdoc and then a staff scientist. His desire to teach led him to look for University positions, and he was hired as Assistant Professor at Indiana University in 2004, and then at UC Davis in 2006, where he is now full professor. He is the featured scientist and narrator of the IMAX film, “Secrets of the Universe”, which explores how scientists study the quark soup that existed a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. He is an enthusiastic educator, receiving the UC Davis Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 2013. He is committed to increasing diversity in STEM: as a member of the UC Davis Strength Through Equity and Diversity (STEAD) Committee, he received the “Soaring to New Heights” Faculty Citation Award for Diversity and Principles of Community, highlighting outstanding efforts to increase diversity. He is a member of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee. He continues to do research at Brookhaven Lab, and at CERN in the Large Hadron Collider focusing on b-quark bound states and Z bosons. He has continued to open opportunities for Latinos and women to be involved in the STEM fields in general, and in Physics in particular.