IRIS : Charged particle reaction spectroscopy at ISAC

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A large part of our universe is powered by nuclear reactions, that are the secret behind the glow of the sun and the shine of the stars. In our laboratories nuclear reactions and scattering are the ways to unearth the secrets that lie in the heart of the atom. This project focuses on exploring the isotopes with a large excess of neutrons over protons or vice versa, that possibly exist in certain environments of our universe such as supernovae, neutron stars etc. The ground breaking new discoveries about their unknown properties will become possible using the newly constructed facility IRIS at Canada's National Laboratory for subatomic physics, TRIUMF in Vancouver, BC. The IRIS facility has pioneered in the use of a thin ice sheet of solid hydrogen (i.e. hydrogen gas solidified directly) on a silver foil. This will allow us to unravel how nature creates the majority of the elements that we depend on today. The unexpected characteristics of these unstable nuclei make it necessary to seek answers to the fundamental question on how nature organizes the neutrons and protons to form a bound system and how do they behave at the limit when they become unbound.