Nuclear Physics

Nuclear physics is more than a hundred year old. Yet, some fundamental aspects of the nucleus as a collection of protons and neutrons are still not well understood. One reason is that, in most nuclei, there are too many nucleons to start from the bare nucleon-nucleon interaction but not enough to rely on mean field approaches. Although we think we have a good handle on the bare nucleon-nucleon interaction, understanding the effective nucleon-nucleon interaction in nuclei is more challenging.

My interest mainly lies in the study of light nuclei far from stability, where the properties of this effective nucleon-nucleon interaction can be best studied experimentally. A lot of the work I do is based at Radioactive Ion Beam facilities in the US and Canada. The work is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) – Office of Science). I have also become involved in a project aiming at producing short-lived isotopes (T1/2 ~ one day) at the USGS TRIGA reactor (Lakewood Federal Center) for medical applications. This work is supported by a Proof of Concept grant from both the State of Colorado and Mines.