15–20 Jun 2025
Girona
Europe/Brussels timezone

Nuclear Astrophysics with Stored Highly Charged Radioactive Ions

19 Jun 2025, 18:15
15m
Girona

Girona

Palau de Congressos de Girona Pg. de la Devesa, 35 17001 Girona

Speaker

Yury Litvinov (GSI Darmstadt)

Description

Storage of freshly produced secondary particles in a storage ring is a straightforward way to achieve the most efficient use of the rare species as it allows for using the same secondary ion multiple times. Employing storage rings for precision physics experiments with highly-charged ions (HCI) at the intersection of atomic, nuclear, plasma and astrophysics is a rapidly developing field of research. The number of physics cases is enormous. In the focus of this presentation will be the most recent results obtained at the Experimental Storage Ring ESR of GSI in Darmstadt and the Experimental Cooler-Storage Ring CSRe of IMP in Lanzhou.
Both the ESR and CSRe rings are coupled to in-flight fragment separators and are employed for precision mass spectrometry of short-lived rare nuclei. At CSRe, the enabled measurement of the velocity of every stored particle—in addition to its revolution frequency—has boosted the sensitivity and precision of mass measurements, which lead to accurate determination of the remaining masses constraining matter flow though 64Ge waiting point in the rp-process nucleosynthesis.
The ESR is presently the only instrument dedicatedly utilized for precision studies of decays of HCIs. Radioactive decays of HCIs can be very different as known in neutral atoms. Some decay channels can be blocked while new ones can become open. Such decays reflect atom-nucleus interactions and are relevant for atomic physics and nuclear structure as well as for nucleosynthesis in stellar objects. After several decades of tedious preparatory work, the bound state beta decay of 205Tl could be measured. This quantity allowed us to address the history of the early Solar system and to provide constraints on the feasibility of geochemical Solar pp-neutrino detection.
Furthermore, both the CSRe and the ESR are utilized for nuclear reaction studies, where the beam cooling combined with internal ultra-thin ultra-pure windowless gas targets enables high angular and energy resolution. In the recent years, a series of proton-induced reactions were addressed in the ESR, where, thanks to new background elimination techniques, in addition to (p,g) reaction channel also the (p,n) reactions can simultaneously be measured. As a highlight, the first (p,g) and (p,n) cross-sections for radioactive 118Te could be investigated in the vicinity of the Gamow window of the g-process.
Several experiments are planned in Spring 2025 at the ESR, CSRe and the dedicated low-energy CRYRING. Dependent on the progress of these experiment, some fresh results might be available to be reported at the conference.

Author

Yury Litvinov (GSI Darmstadt)

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