Nuclear physics with radioactive beams CERN and FAIR

The building blocks of the matter around us consist of stable atomic nuclei that are the end product of a multitude of processes that we believe started with the Big Bang, proceeded via nuclear reactions in stars, and for the heaviest elements potentially ended with neutron-induced reactions triggered by neutron star mergers.

Consequently, many of the atomic nuclei that participated in these processes were themselves unstable reaction products.

From theoretical models we know that there should be ca 6000 particle stable, although beta-decaying, atomic nuclei between the driplines, beyond which the strong force in the nucleus is not strong enough to add additional single neutrons or protons. The stable atomic nuclei on the other hand are ca 300.

Consequently, to understand the processes that led to the creation of matter it is necessary to understand the properties of unstable nuclear systems. However, to do so requires that we can study nuclear reactions with unstable, i.e., radioactive, atomic nuclei. The purpose of this project is to do exacly this using new facilities and detectors we have developed with colleagues.

In the project we will study transfer reactions to specific, so-called single-particle dominated states, that are of interest for nuclear models, using the new HIE-ISOLDE postaccelerator at CERN, and we will study underlying microscopic effects for the formation of nucleon-nucleon pairs, so-called short-range correlations, at the R3B experiment at FAIR.