Through the Nuclear Looking Glass: Probing Fundamental Physics of Atoms and Neutron Stars
International Conference on Nuclear Physics
These environments include an atom’s nucleus and celestial bodies known as neutron stars, both of which are among the densest objects known to humanity. For comparison, matching the density of a neutron star would require squeezing all the Earth’s mass into a space about the size of Spartan Stadium.
Brown’s theory laid the blueprints for connecting the properties of nuclei to neutron stars, but building that bridge with experiments would be challenging. It would take years and the unique capabilities of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The facility, also known as Jefferson Lab, is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, national laboratory in Virginia. So experimentalists got to work on a decades-long series of studies and Brown largely returned to his other projects.
That is, until 2017. That’s when he said he started thinking about the beautiful precision experiments run by his colleague Kei Minamisono’s group at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, or NSCL, and in the near-future at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB. FRIB is a DOE-SC user facility at MSU that will start scientific user operation in early 2022
“It’s amazing how new ideas come to you,” said Brown, a professor of physics at FRIB and in MSU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.
The goal of this new idea was the same as his earlier theory, but it could be tested using what are known as “mirror nuclei” to provide a faster and simpler path to that destination.
In fact, on October 29, 2021, the team published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters based on data from an experiment that took a few days to run. This comes on the heels of new data from the Jefferson Lab experiments that took years to acquire.
“It’s quite incredible,” Brown said. “You can do experiments that take a few years to run and experiments that take a few days and get results that are very similar.”
To be clear, the experiments in Michigan and Virginia are not competing. Rather, Krishna Kumar, a member and past chair of the Jefferson Lab Users Organization, called the experiments “wonderfully complementary.”
“A detailed comparison of these measurements will allow us to test our assumptions and increase the robustness of connecting the physics of the very small — nuclei — to the physics of the very large — neutron stars,” said Kumar, who is also the Gluckstern Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The progress made in both experiment and theory on this broad topic underscores the importance and uniqueness of the capabilities of Jefferson Lab and NSCL, and the future will bring more such examples as new measurements are carried out at FRIB.”
These projects also underscore the importance of theorists and experimentalists working together, especially when tackling fundamental mysteries of the universe. It was this type of collaboration that kicked off the Jefferson Lab’s experiments 20 years ago, and it’s this type of collaboration that will power future discoveries at FRIB.
“I work on many things and these are very isolated papers,” Brown said. Despite that, Brown shared them quickly. “I wrote both papers in a couple months.”
When Brown completed the draft of his 2017 theory, he immediately shared it with Minamisono.
“I remember I was at a conference when I got the email from Alex,” said Minamisono, a senior physicist at FRIB. “I was so excited when I read that paper.”
The excitement came from Minamisono’s knowledge that his team could lead the experiments to test the paper’s ideas and from the theory’s implications for the cosmos.
For the NSCL experiments, the team needed to measure how much room the protons take up in a specific nickel nucleus. This is called the charge radius. In particular, the team examined the charge radius for nickel-54, a nickel nuclei or isotope with 26 neutrons. (All nickel isotopes have 28 protons, and those with 26 neutrons are called nickel-54 because the two numbers add up to 54.)
What’s special about nickel-54 is that scientists already know the charge radius of its mirror nucleus, iron-54, an iron nucleus with 26 protons and 28 neutrons.
“One nucleus has 28 protons and 26 neutrons. For the other, it’s flipped,” said Skyy Pineda, a lead author on the new research paper and a graduate student researcher on Minamisono’s team. By subtracting the charge radii, the researchers effectively remove the protons and are left with that thin neutron layer.
“If you take the difference of the charge radii of the two nuclei, the result is the neutron skin,” Pineda said.
To measure the charge radius of nickel-54, the team turned to its Beam Cooler and Laser Spectroscopy facility, abbreviated BECOLA. Using BECOLA, experimentalists overlap a beam of nickel-54 isotopes with a beam of laser light. Based on how the light interacts with the isotope beam, the Spartans can measure the nickel’s charge radius, Pineda said.
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