FRIB’s nuclear data center supports users

The nuclear data center at FRIB was established in April 2015 under the U.S. Nuclear Data Program (USNDP) which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Office of Nuclear Physics, with a mission to provide current, accurate, authoritative data for workers in pure and applied areas of nuclear science and engineering, and also to address gaps in the data, through targeted experimental studies and the use of theoretical models. The FRIB data center contributes to USNDP primarily by compiling and evaluating experimental nuclear structure and decay data (directly measured or deduced) for two major databases:

  • ENSDF (Evaluated Nuclear Structure Data File) database: Evaluates experimental data from journal papers, conference proceedings, lab reports, and thesis, and recommends the best values for each mass chain.
  • XUNDL (eXperimental Unevaluated Nuclear Data List) database: Compiles (unevaluated) data from current publications for each paper; provides rapid access to formatted data from latest publications; serves as data repository for unpublished data.

The FRIB data center is responsible for evaluating data for the mass regions of A=31 to 44 and A=60 to 73 (excluding 62, 67-70 at other centers) assigned within the international network of Nuclear Structure and Decay Data (NSDD) evaluators, and for compiling data from the most recent publications with the priority given to nuclear structure and decay data from FRIB.

In addition, the FRIB data center takes the leading role in development of new utility and analysis codes for XUNDL compilation and ENSDF evaluation, and modernization of the legacy ENSDF codes, which are hosted at the IAEA website and widely used by the NSDD evaluators during the stages of compilation, evaluation, validation and dissemination. 

As an integral part of FRIB, the MSU Nuclear Data Center takes the responsibility to provide data support to FRIB experimenters under the framework of the FRIENDS (FRIB Integral Experimental Nuclear Data Services) project as part of the laboratory support to FRIB users. Data support through the FRIENDS project covers all existing experimental nuclear structure and decay. It includes services for data needs in the stages of proposal preparation, data taking, data analysis, and publication preparation (aiming to help FRIB users for fast publication), as well as service for checking data in proposals submitted to FRIB PAC.

FRIB will enable significant discoveries about the properties of rare isotopes and thus is expected to generate a large amount of nuclear structure and decay data. The FRIB data center will serve to enhance these scientific discoveries by promptly compiling, evaluating and disseminating all new data from FRIB, and will also establish procedures and effectively guide researchers, for example the FRIENDS project, to prepare/publish data from the operation of the accelerator facility at FRIB in a proper format that is convenient for reading, extracting and compiling.

For more information, please contact: Jun Chen.