Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

Committee: Guillaume Machicoane (Chairperson), Wade Fisher, Steven Lidia, Christopher Wrede. Thesis is available @ https://pa.msu.edu/graduate-program/current-graduate-students/draft-dissertations-for-review.aspx - Select student name

The production of elements produced in stars is one of the main questions that is of critical interest in nuclear astrophysics. The majority of elements are traditionally produced via the slow (s) and rapid (r) processes. Recent astronomical observations have shown “strange” abundance patterns of Carbon-Enhanced Metal Poor (CEMP) stars, which cannot be explained by the s- and the r-processes alone, indicating that an additional intermediate nucleosynthesis process is required to explain these abundance patterns, known as the i-process. Nuclear properties needed to predict elemental abundances are relatively well constrained, except for the neutron-capture reaction rates, which are almost entirely provided by theory. Direct neutron-capture measurements, at present, are feasible only for stable and long-lived nuclei. For nuclei with short half-lives, indirect techniques are required to constrain neutron-capture reaction rates. In this talk, I will be discussing an indirect neutron-capture technique, namely the 𝛽-Oslo method, which uses 𝛽-decays to populate states in our nuclei interest. Recent sensitivity studies have shown that Rb abundances are strongly affected as a result of neutron-capture reactions on Kr isotopes, where one reaction of particular interest is 87Kr(n,𝛾)88Kr. In this talk, the first experimental constraint of the 87Kr(n,𝛾)88Kr reaction will be discussed utilizing the 𝛽-Oslo method. The experiment took place using the CARIBU facility at Argonne National Laboratory, where 𝛽-decays from the 88Br nuclei into 88Kr was implemented. Subsequent 𝛾-rays were identified using the Summing NaI detector, SuN, and the SuNTAN tape transport system. By utilizing the statistical properties of 88Kr, the 87Kr(n,𝛾)88Kr experimentally constrained cross section has been extracted, and its impact on the astrophysical i-process will be discussed.

Storytelling can be one exceptionally powerful way for fostering a thriving environment in our scientific community. Join us for an enlightening session in which two awesome physicist-filmmakers, Dr. Ágnes Mócsy and Dr. Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez share their unique perspectives on filmmaking as a venue to share our stories, walking right at the intersections of the sciences and the arts. In conversation with one another and Pablo Giuliani as a guiding panelist, these filmmakers will discuss the creative and human aspects of science, the collaborative potential between art and research, and how documentary filmmaking can dismantle stereotypes surrounding scientists and help engage us all.

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.

Committee: Steven Lidia (chairperson), Marco Cortesi, Alexandra Gade, Sean Liddick, Nathan Whitehorn. Thesis is available @ https://pa.msu.edu/graduate-program/current-graduate-students/draft-dissertations-for-review.aspx - Select student name