The Michigan State University Board of Trustees authorized construction of a high-bay addition to the west end of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). The addition will triple the testing capacity of the current chip-testing facility by providing two additional user vaults. The K500 Chip Testing Facility at FRIB will help meet the current national shortfall of testing capacity for advanced microelectronics, including those used for commercial spaceflight, wireless technology, and autonomous vehicles.
Michigan State University’s Board of Trustees approved a $17 million expansion to the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams’ Chip Testing Facility. As one of only three chip testing facilities based on heavy-ion accelerators, the facility is currently fully booked. The addition of two more “testing endstations” will triple its current capacity to test circuitry against cosmic rays, according to the proposal.
Physics of Atomic Nuclei (PAN) is a free week-long program that introduces students to the fundamentals of the extremely small domain of atomic nuclei and its connection to astrophysics and cosmology. The program is sponsored by the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University.
Staff from The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) Low Energy Beam and Ion Trap (LEBIT) facility take high-energy, rare-isotope beams generated at FRIB and cool them to a lower energy state. Afterward, the researchers measure specific particles' masses at high precision. The LEBIT team recently published a research paper that used the facility to take a step in verifying the mass of aluminum-22. Researchers think this exotic isotope demonstrates a rare but interesting property—specifically, that the nucleus is surrounded by a "halo" of protons that loosely orbit the nucleus. This halo structure reveals distinctive physical properties during its fleeting existence.
Physicists Saori Pastore and Maria Piarulli in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis are part of an influential group of scientists shaping the theoretical framework behind exciting new experiments at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), a $730 million U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research facility.