Rare Isotope Lab

I spent the past week in the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL, which will soon become a bigger lab called FRIB) where I learned about basic concepts in Nuclear Science and about the research conducted in NSCL. The goal of NSCL is, as my teacher told me, to “Smash hard and smash often”. Literally.

NSCL is an accelerator and they bring neutrons, protons, and nuclei of other atoms together from up to 0.6x the speed of light. Then hopefully, the energy in that collision will be strong enough for the particles to come within 10^-15 meters together for the strong force to take over and force the particles together. This creates new isotopes.

I would love to tell you about everything I’ve learned this past week, but I’m sure wikipedia does a better job at that, so I’ll tell you why their work is important.

First, a major interest in this field is how elements on earth were created. Scientists have established that everything that exists on earth (except those that were manmade) was created in stars. Stars fuse together elements starting from Hydrogen to generate energy and to keep shining. It takes a lot of energy to get past Hydrogen fusion, but eventually some stars (if they are big enough) get to Iron 56. Then fusion stops all together because Iron 56 is the most stable isotope and it doesn’t generate any more energy.

That leads to the question, where did all the other elements come from?

That is the central question of rare isotope research. If scientists are able to answer this question, a lot of major mysteries in our universe are simplified (if only ever so slightly).

The rare isotopes that these scientists discover can also further be used in radiology labs (treating cancer through radiation therapy), nuclear power generation, smoke alarms, cell phones, materials science, etc.

Although nuclear science is a new and not well known field, it has many applications, from understanding the basis of our universe to treating modern diseases.

If you are interested, I heavily suggest you look into it, especially as a major. I was told that Nuclear Science majors (or graduate majors) only have an unemployment rate of 0.4%!