Graduate student working at FRIB. Find out more

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.

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Capabilities

In establishing and operating FRIB, capabilities were developed that transfer to other industries and applications.

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Artificial intelligence/machine learning graphic
A graphic showing surrogate models for linear responses Photo of Dean Lee sitting at a desk in a classroom setting

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.

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Learn more about upcoming events taking place at FRIB. 

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  • 3 April 2026
  • 11:00 EDT
 Welcome to the New Era of Precision Neutrino Physics: Bridging High and Low Energy Nuclear Physics DUNE and Hyper-K are the next generation of long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, and they promise to explore the degree of CP violation in the leptonic sector using the most intense accelerator neutrino beams to ever exist. The use of intense accelerator-based neutrino sources and truly gargantuan detectors will likely produce the largest few GeV neutrino scattering data set ever made, but the use of Argon as a nuclear target will sharply emphasize the uncertainties in the current state of the art cross-section models which are needed for the extraction of oscillation parameters. Fermilab finds itself poised to exploit a compelling opportunity that can position the neutrino as an underutilized and novel modern probe of nucleon structure. The first order of business concerns reducing the uncertainties of the cross-section model for the purposes of oscillation experiments. The most direct route involves the resurrection of the fast-cycling bubble chamber program last embodied by the Fermilab 15-Foot Bubble Chamber. The next task is to integrate the coming wave of artificial intelligence in the problem of enhancing model precision and flexibility. This talk will review the physics program and construction status of a fast-cycling bubble chamber design study for use with neutrinos at Fermilab, discuss the impact of two studies by and for the MoNA Collaboration in this program on the improvement of the MENATE_R tool and the application of a bubble chamber target to improve knowledge of neutrino-neutron scattering, and review the Genesis Mission, a new Manhattan Project scale program implemented by the DOE to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence.
  • 3 April 2026
  • 5:30 EDT
 Advanced Studies Gateway piano recital: Ya-Ju Chuang and Zhao Wang Pianists Ya-Ju Chuang and Zhao Wang present a four-hand program featuring works by Mel Bonis, Fanny Mendelssohn, Cécile Chaminade, Amy Beach, Eleanor Alberga, and Libby Larsen. Spanning the 19th to 21st centuries, the program brings together a range of styles and perspectives in the piano duet repertoire. https://frib.msu.edu/public-engagement/arts-and-activities-at-frib/advanced-stu…
  • 7 April 2026
  • 11:00 EDT
 Mean-field approximation on steroids: exact description of the deuteron In this talk, we will demonstrate that the deuteron, i.e., the lightest bound nuclear system made of a single proton and a single neutron, can be accurately described within a mean-field-based framework. Although paradoxical at first glance, we will show that the deuteron ground-state binding energy, magnetic dipole moment, electric quadrupole moment, and root-mean-square proton radius can indeed be reproduced with sub-percent accuracy via a low-dimensional linear combination of non-orthogonal Bogoliubov states, i.e., with a method whose numerical cost scales as n^4, where n is the dimension of the basis of the one-body Hilbert space. By further putting the system into a harmonic trap, the neutron-proton scattering length and effective range in the 3S1 channel are also accurately reproduced. To achieve this task, (i) the inclusion of proton-neutron pairing through the mixing of proton and neutron single-particle states in the Bogoliubov transformation and (ii) the restoration of proton and neutron numbers before variation are shown to be mandatory ingredients. This unexpected result has implications regarding the most efficient way to capture necessary correlations as a function of nuclear mass in ab initio frameworks based on modern chiral interactions. In particular, this work illustrates the power of the symmetry-breaking and -restoration techniques, which have been traditionally employed within the context of energy density functional calculations but also gained popularity in ab initio methods in recent years.
Training the next generation

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.

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External news and journal publications discussing FRIB.

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  • 4 March 2026
  • Lansing State Journal

Michigan State University's K500 Chip Testing Facility, inaugurated in February at FRIB, cost approximately $14 million to establish, with funding provided by the U.S. Department of Defense. The project repurposed the campus' K500 superconducting cyclotron, completed in 1982 for high-energy, heavy-ion research, including producing and accelerating ion beams to study nuclear structure, to now allow the facility to test semiconductors for space, defense and on-Earth applications.

 https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/campus/2026/03/04/msu-micr…
  • 22 January 2026
  • Phys.org

Researchers have reported new experimental results addressing the origin of rare proton-rich isotopes heavier than iron, called p-nuclei. Led by Artemis Tsantiri, then-graduate student at FRIB and current postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regina in Canada, the study presents the first rare isotope beam measurement of proton capture on arsenic-73 to produce selenium-74, providing new constraints on how the lightest p-nucleus is formed and destroyed in the cosmos.

 https://phys.org/news/2026-01-cosmic-rare-proton-rich-isotope.html
  • 26 March 2025
  • Lansing State Journal

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.

 https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/campus/2025/03/26/msu-frib…