Edinburgh University, Edinburgh
TRIUMF, Vancouver
Since the 1980s the nuclear physics community has pursued the development of intense and exotic radioactive ion beams for many areas of study including astrophysics. The myriad of radionuclides that exist fleetingly inside explosive stellar scenarios are involved in nuclear reactions which are extremely difficult to model from theory, and in these cases experimental data is crucial. The measurement problems of astrophysics often require not only the most sensitive detectors and most intense radioactive beams, but also the right combination of experimental facilities, accelerators and detectors. The community has tackled these problems in a variety of different ways, with many labs already active or coming online with new aggressive accelerator, isotope production and measurement technology ready to target the big astrophysics questions. This talk gives an overview of some experimental methods and facilities used to derive astrophysically-relevant nuclear properties and highlights the places in the world that perform these studies.
ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Funding: *SNS is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 for the U.S. Department of Energy
The combined time required for diffusion release from target materials and effusive-flow of short-lived ion species must be minimized at ISOL based radioactive ion beam (RIB) facilities. Computational simulation studies with state-of-the-art codes offer cost effective means for designing targets with optimized diffusion release properties and vapor transport systems with short path lengths, as required for such applications. To demonstrate the power of the technique for designing optimum thickness targets, analytic solutions to the diffusion equation are compared with those obtained from a finite-difference code for radioactive particle release from simple geometries. The viability of the Monte Carlo technique as a practical means for optimally designing vapor transport systems is demonstrated by simulating the effusive-flow of neutral particles through several complex vapor transport systems. Important issues which affect the yield rates of short-lived species generated in high power ISOL targets are also discussed.