Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

Committee: Witold Nazarewicz (Chairperson), Metin Aktulga, Paul Gueye, Filomena Nunes, Johannes Pollanen. Thesis is available @ https://pa.msu.edu/graduate-program/current-graduate-students/draft-dissertations-for-review.aspx - Select student name

Committee: Witold Nazarewicz (Chairperson), Heiko Hergert, Ryan LaRose, Hendrik Schatz, Yang Yang Thesis is available @ https://pa.msu.edu/graduate-program/current-graduate-students/draft-dissertations-for-review.aspx - Select student name

In recent times, it has become commonplace to mention the unification of structure and reaction nuclear theory as one of the hot topics in low-energy nuclear physics. This interest is, of course, not new, but some present circumstances might have made it more acute. First, the experimental access to very weakly bound or unbound nuclei has blurred the limits between structure and reaction theory. Second, the fast development of computational tools and resources has rendered scattering problems tractable with bound states techniques. We will also address some ideas in the path to another important unification: the theory of direct and compound nucleus reactions. This line of research is important in order to address important processes, such as capture reactions, involving nuclei away from the stability valley, where an unusually low level density calls for the description of a transition between the statistical and direct reaction regimes.

The RMS radii of the neutron distribution in both 208Pb and 48Ca have been precisely measured by the PREX and CREX experiments via the parity violating asymmetry in longitudinally polarized elastic electron-nucleus scattering. The advantage of these parity violating electron scattering measurements lies in the use of an electroweak probe to measure these quantities, significantly reducing uncertainties from theoretical interpretations. The PREX measurement of the large 208Pb nucleus, for which nuclear density functional theory can be applied, provides meaningful constraints on the density dependence of the symmetry energy of neutron-rich nuclear matter; an important parameter for the nuclear equation of state. The complimentary CREX measurement of the modestly sized, neutron rich 48Ca nucleus, for which edge effects are significant, provides an important benchmark for nuclear theory to help bridge ab-initio theoretical approaches and the nuclear density functional theory. While the electroweak nature of the interaction lends itself to a clean interpretation of the results it also presents significant experimental hurdles, including the need to employ innovative precision beam control techniques. This talk will give an overview experimental results from the PREX and CREX collaborations, will touch upon the tension observed between these results and select theoretical calculations and measurements, and will describe the techniques employed to meet the stringent systematic uncertainty goals arising from beam asymmetries during the PREX-II and CREX experiments. The upcoming MOLLER experiment which will utilize these beam control techniques to search for new BSM (Beyond the Standard Model) physics through ultra-precise measurement of the weak charge of the electron will also be discussed.

Stars in nearly all globular clusters show complex relations among the abundances light elements (up to Na). Many also show anti-correlations of Mg and Al. A rare few display variations in K. Until a few years ago, only one cluster (M15) conclusively showed any star-to-star variation in neutron-capture elements, like Eu. Using a trick of stellar evolution, I show that these variations are primordial, not caused by external pollution. I also show evidence that M92 also has variations in neutron-capture abundances among the first generation of stars but not the second. The evidence points to a very prompt, rare source of r-process enrichment. I will close with ongoing work at Notre Dame to interrogate other globular clusters for their secrets about the r-process.

Committee: Steven Lidia (Thesis Advisor), Scott Pratt (Committee Chair), Sergey Baryshev Joshua Coleman, Artemis Spyrou. Thesis is available @ https://pa.msu.edu/graduate-program/current-graduate-students/draft-dissertations-for-review.aspx - Select student name

Trio in A major for two violin and viola by Mykola Lysenko I. Andante. Allegro animato II. Romance III. Scherzo IV. Finale Bios: Mengyuan Song is a violist from China. She is currently a first year DMA student at Michigan State University, studying violia performance with Professor Mike Chen. She previously completed the master degree from The University of Northern Colorado and completed Graduate Professional Diploma from The Hartt School. Min-Han Tsai is a violinist from Taiwan. He is currently a first year DMA student at Michigan State University, studying violin performance with Professor I-Fu Wang. He previously completed the master degree and a performance Certificate from Bowling Green State University, and he was the concertmaster of the BGSU Philharmonia and performed in the Graduate String Quartet. Min-Han is currently an active performer in Michigan. Lyudmila Gofurova is a violinist from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. She is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Violin Performance at Michigan State University under the guidance of Professor Yvonne Lam. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Tashkent. As a member of the Uzbekistan Youth Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra of Uzbekistan, she has performed in over 10 countries. Lyudmila is an active performer, chamber musician, and dedicated educator in Michigan.

A James Madison College event at FRIB.

TBD

Learning is one way how biological systems change. Evolution can also be thought of as learning but on longer time scales. This presentation will describe emerging evidence showing that biological systems organize them according to hyperbolic surfaces and that these surfaces expand according to similar principles in both learning and evolution. Across different scales of biological organization, biological networks often exhibit hierarchical tree-like organization. For networks with such structure, hyperbolic geometry provides a natural metric because of its exponentially expanding resolution. I will describe how the use of hyperbolic geometry can be helpful for visualizing and analyzing information acquisition and learning process from across biology, from viruses, to plants and animals, including the brain. We find that local noise causes data to exhibit Euclidean geometry on small scales, but that at broader scales hyperbolic geometry becomes visible and pronounced. The hyperbolic maps are typically larger for datasets of more diverse and differentiated cells, e.g. with a range of ages. We find that adding a constraint on large distances according to hyperbolic geometry improves the performance of t-SNE algorithm to a large degree causing it to outperform other leading methods, such as UMAP and standard t-SNE. For neural responses, I will describe data showing that neural responses in the hippocampus have a low-dimensional hyperbolic geometry and that their hyperbolic size is optimized for the number of available neurons. It was also possible to analyze how neural representations change with experience. In particular, neural representations continued to be described by a low-dimensional hyperbolic geometry but the radius increased logarithmically with time. This time dependence matches the maximal rate of information acquisition by a maximum entropy discrete Poisson process, further implying that neural representations continue to perform optimally as they change with experience. Tatyana Sharpee received her PhD in condensed matter physics from Michigan State University studying under the supervision of Mark Dykman. After her PhD, she started to work in computational neuroscience at UCSF where she developed statistical methods for analyzing neural responses to natural stimuli, which exhibit strong correlations and non-Gaussian effects. These methods made it possible to reveal new adaptation processes in the brain by comparing neural responses to white noise and natural stimuli. Her independent research program has started at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where she is currently a Professor in the Computational Neurobiology and Integrative Biology Laboratories. Dr. Sharpee is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

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.

The Nuclear Science Summer School (NS3) is a summer school that introduces undergraduate student participants to the fields of nuclear science and nuclear astrophysics. NS3 is hosted by FRIB on the campus of Michigan State University (MSU). The school will offer lectures and activities covering selected nuclear science and astrophysics topics.

PAN introduces participants to the fundamentals of the extremely small domain of atomic nuclei and its connection to the extremely large domain of astrophysics and cosmology.

The PAN @ Michigan State Experience

• Learn about research in one of the top rare-isotope laboratories in the world.
• Get introduced to the fascinating fields of astrophysics, precision measurement, and nuclear science.
• Perform your own nuclear physics experiments.
• Meet researchers who are exploring a wide array of questions.
• Discover the surprising array of career opportunities in science.
• Experience the atmosphere of college life.
• Participants in the 2024 program get free room and board on campus (if required).