The world's most powerful heavy-ion accelerator, which will create new exotic atoms and reveal how stars and supernovas forge the elements that make up our universe, is finally completed, researchers announced May 2.
Experiments at the $730 million Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University are expected to start this week. Once online, the new reactor will split the heavy atomic nuclei into two parts, so that scientists can study what glues them together and how rare atomic isotopes are.
The National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory was able to catch a glimpse of exotic atoms, but they didn't produce them at a fast enough rate to make detailed study possible. Researchers will be given access to more than 1,000 new isotopes, which will give them fresh insight into new cancer treatments, as well as ancient materials and nuclear security.
The X particle was detected at the dawn of time.
More than 1,600 scientists are eager to work at the new research center, the director said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Physicists are excited by the fact that the FRIB may provide a better view of the landscape of possible atomic isotopes. Physicists have a good idea of what holds the nucleus together, and have made a number of models to predict what the nucleus might look like. The models are too simplistic because nuclei are complex and can glue together in surprising ways. A number of the nuclei predicted by the models might not hold up.
Scientists hope to answer questions such as how stable the most stable isotopes are, and how elements heavier than iron and nickel are formed through radioactive decay. When an atomic nucleus absorbs a neutron, it becomes unstable, and when one of its neutrons becomes a protons, it becomes unstable.
Until now, scientists have not been able to check or study what kinds of elements are produced and what proportions they are made of. Scientists will finally be able to test these suppositions if the speed of the individual isotopes is increased by the FRIB.
Physicists pick atoms of heavy elements such as uranium, stripping them of their electrons to turn them into ionized plutonium. They will launch them down a 1,476-foot-long (450 meters) pipe that will take them to the speed of light. At the end of the pipe, the beam of ion will hit a wheel and splinter into smaller particles.
Physicists will be able to choose which isotope they want to fire into one of the facility's experimental halls by steering these freshly made isotopes through a series of magnets. The $3.27 billion Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is currently being built in Darmstadt, Germany. Antimatter as well as matter will be made and stored by the accelerator, which will be finished in 2027.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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