Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

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.

Committee: Ting Xu (Chairperson), Sergey Baryshev, Wade Fisher, Paul Gueye, Rachel Henderson, Peter Ostroumov

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.

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).