Visiting a student at RIKEN

Part of my trip to Japan involves visiting a Surrey undergraduate MPhys student who is on his Research Year placement at the Radioactive Ion Beam Facility at RIKEN, just outside Tokyo.   

The student, Richard, is working on the Rare-RI Ring^{[link to open access paper on the apparatus]}, a storage ring in which very unstable neutron-rich isotopes are injected, following their creation at the production target.  Here, by measuring their cyclotron frequency, their masses can be deduced.  Ultimately, good knowledge of these masses is important to understand the r-process of nucleosynthesis which takes place in (probably) colliding neutron stars and certain kinds of supernova.  Richard's task it to work on a replacement for one of the detectors which detects the precise location of the ion beam for one which perturbs the flight of the particle less as it makes the measurement, and hence increases the accuracy.

Here in the picture is Richard standing by the detector, where he is currently spending his days making measurements to characterise how it is working.

As well as his work, Richard has been enjoying getting to know Tokyo at the weekends.

Big in Japan

Following a trip to see a student on placement at the University of Massachusetts last week, I'm now in Japan seeing another one (see photo), who is based at the RIBF (Radioactive Ion Beam Facility) in RIKEN, just outside Tokyo.  Lily is working on a new storage ring which will be used for precision mass measurements of exotic isotopes that will hopefully shed light on the r–process which takes place in stellar explosions and is responsible for creating heavy nuclei that we find on Earth today.  The intermediary nuclei in these nuclear reactions are very neutron rich and unstable, and the ones created in the stellar environments decayed very shortly after their creation.  The facility at RIKEN is currently unique in the world in its ability to create such neutron-rich isotopes

I had a guided tour of the lab this morning by Lily and her supervisor.  It's a lot cleaner and shinier than most other labs I have been to (with the possible exception of the NIF in the US), but I have been assured that it was just because the bits I was seeing were so new, and not quite in operation yet.  The storage ring will be tested and ready for use during the year, so it should be a good year to be here on placement.  Ironically, this nuclear physics lab cannot run for as much of the year as it used to due to the increase in electricity costs following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and the damage at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.  Japan has shut down all its other nuclear reactors, which used to provide around 30% of the country's electricity.