RUI: Nuclear Physics Research with Undergraduate Students

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Nuclei are the basic building blocks of matter and understanding their fundamental properties is the main goal of this award. The PI and her team of undergraduate students will use the newly developed La Crosse fIREBAll detector system, located at the University of Notre Dame’s Nuclear Science Laboratory, to measure conversion electrons in the Erbium-166 nucleus. This information will be combined with previous data to address an open question in nuclear physics about how or if nuclei vibrate. This research program will involve the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse undergraduate students early in their scientific career in publishable research through detector development, data analysis, and collaborative projects. The students will present their work at national conferences, be involved in writing results in peer-reviewed papers, and acquire skills important for the next generation of scientists.Nuclei show some emergent collective behavior across isotopic and isobaric chains and are known to be deformed in shape in regions of the chart of nuclides away from closed shell. This award will investigate the vibrational degrees of freedom superimposed on the deformed ground states and the expected rotational excited states built upon them. The PI and her team of undergraduate students aim to determine the characteristics of excited state by the measurement of conversion electrons in coincidence with gamma rays, using the only array of its kind in the US. At the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse students will also work on High Purity Germanium (HPGe) detectors in a small local laboratory. All experiments will be performed, analyzed, and disseminated in collaboration with UWL undergraduate students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.