Nuclear Physics Meetings in 2020

Bormio: Location of meetings in Jan and Feb 2020

Here is a post, which I will add to over the next 18 months or so, listing (mostly low-energy) nuclear physics meetings taking place in 2020 that I hear about.  Feel free to contact me or comment below with details of any that you think should be added

20/01–24/01: 58th Winter Meeting on Nuclear Physics, Bormio, Italy

It's blurb calls it a long-standing conference, and indeed at #58, it may hold a record for the most-held nuclear physics meeting.  The remit is very broad, including what might once have been called nuclear physics, but is now particle physics.  It is preceded by a one-day pre-conference school for students, covering the basics of the main physics areas dealt with in the conference. 

Bormio is in the Italian Alps, and I understand that there is ample time in the programme for leisure activities, such as skiing. [website]

20/01–24/01: XIII LANSPA: Latin-American Symposium on Nuclear Physics and Applications, San José, Costa Rica
Aimed as a forum for groups in Latin America to share their research, the conference is nevertheless advertised more widely and open to anyone to attend.  [website]

04/02–09/02: Vth Topical Workshop on Modern Aspects in Nuclear Structure, Bormio Italy
Subtitled "The many facets of nuclear structure" this workshop's aim is to explore topical issues in nuclear structure, bringing experimental and theoretical collaborators together.  It's part of a series taking place every two years.  This year, the meeting is preceeded by a one-day satellite meeting on 03/02 on Beta-decay studies: present and future campaigns [website]

24/02–28/02: Conference on Neutrino and Nuclear Physics (CNNP), Cape Town, South Africa
A conference for those working on the interaction between neutrinos and nuclei, whether it be for beta decay, reactor neutrino studies, dark matter searches, solar and supernova modelling and detector technologies.  Or anything else closely related.  This is the followup to a first CNNP meeting held in Catania in 2017 [website] 

06/04–09/04: IoP Nuclear Physics Conferene, Edinburgh, Scotland
The annual UK Institute of Physics Nuclear Physics conference.  Date announced, and further details to come, presumably.  Update (Feb 2020): full details on [website]. Update CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19

15/05–22/05: 13th International Spring Seminar on Nuclear Physics Perspectives and Challenges in Nuclear Structure after 70 Years of Shell Model, Ischia, Italy
A meeting organised by the theory group at the University of Naples, hosted on the island of Ischia.  The topics are fairly broad, covering anything in low-energy nuclear structure.  Should be good, and a lovely setting.  [website]

20/05-22/05: 2020 JINA-CEE Frontiers in Nuclear Astrophysics Conference, South Bend, IN, USA
A save-the-date announcement has gone out (as of Dec 2019) about this conference, with more details to follow.  Update (Feb 2020): here is the [website] Update POSTPONED DUE TO COVID-19

01/06–05/06: Nuclear Photonics 2020, Kurashiki, Japan
A conference on the emerging field of direct interaction and manipulation of nuclei with photons, coming about thanks to the new experimental sources of high-intensity lasers and monochromatic gamma rays.  [website] Update POSTPONED UNTIL 7-11/06/2021 DUE TO COVID-19

11/06–15/06: IWND2020: International Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics in Heavy-Ion Reactions, Zhuhai, China
A recurring workshop on what one learns from heavy-ion reactions.  Though an International workshop, it is China-based, focussing heavily on the research that takes place there.  [website]
  
14/06–19/06: ARIS 2020, Avignon, France
ARIS stands for Advances on Radioactive Isotope Science (sic), and the conference series grew out of a combination of the earlier ENAM (Exotic Nuclei and Atomic Masses, I think) and RNB (Radioactive Nuclear Beams) conferences.  It's quite a general, large conference for work coming out of radioactive beam facilities -- i.e. most of the big nuclear physics labs.  [website]  Update: Postponed to 05/09–10/09

29/06–03/07: DREB2020: Direct Reactions with Exotic Beams, Santiago de Compostella, Spain
A save-the-date email has been sent out for the latest in the series of DREB conferences.  The first circular, with more details, has been promised in Sep 2019:  Update (Feb 2020); here is the full [website]

22/06–26/06: CLUSTER'20: 12th International Conference on Clustering Aspects of Nuclear Structure and Dynamics, Dubna, Russia
For all things to do with the formation and existence of larger-than-nucleon substructures inside a nucleus.  I have recently done some work on reactions leading to the Hoyle state, which can be described as a three-alpha cluster (see here) so may just find myself going along to this.  Dubna is a nice place, though getting a Russian visa is a bit irksome. [website]

29/06–04/07: 10th Intl. Workshop on Quantum Phase Transitions in Nuclei and Many-body Systems, Dubrovnik, Croatia
"Quantum phase transitions" here means things like the change in shape or some other bulk property of a nucleus as a function of the number of particles with the emphasis being on the interpretation of such phenomena with the language and mathematics of phase transitions.  I enjoyed going to a couple of the earlier outings in this series, but don't really feel connected enough to the field to justify attending any more, interesting though it would be [website] Update POSTPONED DUE TO COVID-19

05/07–11/07: IWNT39-2020: 39th International Workshop on Nuclear Theory, Rila Mountains, Bulgaria
A venerable annual meeting organised by the nuclear theory group in Sofia.  I've been to a few of these in the past and have always enjoyed them for the rather relaxed environment with plenty of opportunity for discussion.  A nice way to end the academic year with a visit here [website]

06/07-10/07: EXON-2020: International Symposium on Exotic Nuclei, St Petersburg, Russia
A conference on the production and study of the most exotic, far-from-stability nuclei across the period table from lightest to heaviest.  Co-organised by labs around the world (JINR, RIKEN, GANIL, NSCL, GSI) [website]

26/07–31/07: Nuclear Structure 2020, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Part of a series of conferences on nuclear structure run by US national labs.  One of the first conferences I attended was one of these, organised by Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee when I worked there.  This one is organised by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab,  and held in Santa Cruz, a little south of the San Francisco bay area.  [website]

19/08–23/08: APFB2020; Yamada Conference LXXII: The 8th Asia-Pacific Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, Kanazawa, Japan
This one was advertised to me at the European Few Body conference that I helped organise.  I'm not typically a few-body person (more many-body) so my chance of going to this one are slim, unless the organisers get particularly wowed by the conference proceeding I produced for the European Few Body conference on the triple-alpha reaction [website]

30/08–06/09: 55th Zakopane Conference on Nuclear Physics, Zakopane, Poland
A regular conference taking place in Poland.  The official theme is "extremes of the nuclear landscape" though it's really rather a general conference with talks covering a snapshot of current research in nuclear physics.  I have never been to a Zakopane conference but I understand them to be enjoyable events, with good discussions of physics, and networking in a really nice-sized event (in a nice location, too).  The circulars for this have come out when much of Europe is locked down due to the Covid-19 virus and they are currently (March 2020) planning to go ahead with organizing the conference [website]

31/08–04/09: CGS17: 17th International Symposium on Capture Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy and Related Topics, Grenoble, France
Capture gamma-ray spectroscopy marries capture reactions, in which a nucleus captures a projectile, with gamma ray spectroscopy to study the decay of the resulting compound system.  This is a venerable series, dating back to the 1960s.  Still an active area of research -- perhaps even more so than when it started thanks to the advent of radioactive ion beams [website]

31/08–04/09: PANIC 2020: Particles and Nuclei International Conference 2020, Lisbon, Portugal
A major conference taking place every three years which explores the interface between nuclear and particle physics.  It covers a wide range of topics, from dark matter and cosmology, to applications of nuclear and particle physics technology, with everything experimental and theoretical inbetween.  [website]

08/09–12/09:  7th IEA International workshop Clustering aspects in nuclei and reactions, São Paulo, Brazil
A workshop dedicated to the memory of Mahir Hussein, who died in 2019. [website]

13/09–19/09: Applied Nuclear Physics Conference 2020, Prague, Czechia
A new conference series being set up under the aegis of the European Physical Society Nuclear Physics Division.  As per the title, the conference covers applications of nuclear physics, with a stated particular emphasis on "energy, health, space, security, environment, material science, preservation and study of cultural heritage". Abstract submission opening in December 2019 [website]

02/11-06/09: Shapes and Symmetries in Nuclei, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
A conference on experimental and theoretical work to determine the underlying shapes of nuclei and the symmetries that give rise to them.  Part of a series, always held at Gif-sur-Yvette.  I've not been to these before but it might be a good place to highlight my work on shape-induced mixing of giant resonances that I've been working on inspired by some experimental work from Osaka [website]

15/11–20/11: FUSION20, Shizuoka, Japan
A conference on heavy-ion fusion at energies near the Coulomb barrier.  This topic is a mainstay of my research activities, so I expect to attend this one (as I did the previous outing of the conference in Hobart) [website]

24/11–27/11: International Worshop on Multi-facets of EOS and Clustering, Caen, France
An interesting slew of topics that are not often given co-prominence in a workshop (though of course all aspects of nuclear physics are part of a unified whole): "IWM-EC 2020 will focus on open questions in the domain of nuclear dynamics and thermodynamics, clustering phenomena and also the links between the nuclear Equation of state and Astrophysics." [website] 

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.

JAEA Symposium at Tokai

I am in Japan this week, first at the 54th ASRC International Workshop "Nuclear Fission and Structure of Exotic Nuclei" which is partly based on the fact that the researchers here at JAEA (Japan Atomic Energy Agency) have a target made of Einsteinium-254.  

I've given a talk on calculations to see what prospect there is for making the next unknown elements in the periodic table, and I've been interested to see that others are doing similar things.

This is my first time at JAEA in Tokai, and I was pleased that I managed to navigate here from Haneda Airport on Monday morning, though I waited at the wrong platform at Shinagawa station for a connecting train for a bit until I realised that I was probably at the wrong platform.  

After this workshop ends today, I'm going to RIKEN, in Saitama prefecture just outside Tokyo, to visit an MPhys student from Surrey who is on placement there, and then home on Friday.  

As ever, being at a conference has filled me with ideas and plans, and led to discussions for collaborations.  Now to see how much of that I can bring to fruition.

Congratulations Katie Ley

Some congratulations are in order for The University of Surrey's Katie Ley, who won Gold Medal in Physics in the STEM for Britain Parliamentary Showcase this week:

Congratulations to the winners in the physics category

Bronze - Amalia Thomas
Silver - Lorenzo Zanisi
Gold - Katie Ley#STEM4BRIT19 pic.twitter.com/jmmTPPNmmz

— STEM for Britain (@STEM4Brit) March 13, 2019

Katie is a PhD student at Surrey, working in applied radiation physics.  Here is a recent paper of hers on thermoluminescent dosimetry.  It's behind a paywall, unfortunately, though at some point a freely-dowloadable version should appear on our university repository, and you should be able to find that from the journal website with Unpaywall.

Daphne Jackson at Surrey

What better day than International Women's Day 2019 to write a post about a nuclear physicist who was in the Physics Department here in Surrey some time before me, Daphne Jackson.  

Daphne Jackson was the first female professor of Physics in the UK, here at Surrey — appointed in 1971, at the age of 34.  Initially she worked on the local Surrey specialty of nuclear reaction theory, before applying the theoretical work to nuclear medicine, in diagnosis and treatment.

She was a strong promoter of women in physics, particularly supporting those who had had a career break for family reasons from which the route back in to academic research used to be practically impossible (and is still very difficult).  In 1985 she started a fellowship scheme to enable women to return to research careers.  The scheme was continued after her untimely death in 1991 by the Daphne Jackson Trust, which continues today to help returners (both male and female) to academic research careers.

I attach to this post a couple of pictures I took this morning.  One is of a picture of Prof Jackson, which is hanging up in our Jackson Room.  I took the picture from the side to avoid reflections, hence the strange choice of angle.  The other picture is of a monograph that she wrote with Roger Barrett on fundamental nuclear physics in the mid 70s.  It's still referred to today:  Here is Google Scholar's take on citations in 2018-2019.

The zirconium-88 neutron caputre cross-section mystery

Figure: The neutron capture cross section of
measured nuclei.  The new measurement of
zirconium-88 is the second-highest point. 
From Shusterman et al., Nature 565, 328 (2019)
doi: 10.1038/s41586-018-0838-z

Imagine you are a neutron,  newly–released from a fissioning nucleus in a reactor.  Your new–found freedom involves flying around in an environment full of other nuclei.  If you crash into one, it might grab you and keep you, converting the nucleus to the next-heaviest isotope.

Fortunately for you, you can see all these nuclei and they all look very small, and easy to avoid crashing into.  Except there are a few sneaky ones which can grab you as you fly past. According to a new paper published in Nature by Shusterman et al., zirconium–88 is one such nucleus, for reasons that are not at all clear.

The protons and neutrons in ⁸⁸Zr define a nuclear density which extends up to a radius of a little over 5 fm (= 5 x 10^–15m) which amounts to a cross–sectional area of ≈ π x (5 x 10^–15)² = 2 x 10^–29 m².  According to Shusterman et al., a ⁸⁸Zr nucleus presents an effective cross–sectional area of  9 x 10^-23 m². That's around a million times larger than the extent of the matter that makes up the nucleus.  The effective radius of ⁸⁸Zr for neutron capture is around 5 x 10^–12m.  This is around the same radius as the innermost electrons circling round a zirconium atom.

So a neutron only needs to go in the vicinity of zirconium–88 for it to get captured.  This result is a surprise.  The predictions previous to the experimental work gave a predicted cross section around 4 orders of magnitude smaller. 

The reason why ⁸⁸Zr appears so large to neutrons is a mystery, then.  Presumably there is a strong resonance which makes the nucleus really likely to accept a neutron coming into it with just the right energy (the measurement is integrated over a range of energies).  But then, all nuclei have resonances like this.  Why is it so strong in ⁸⁸Zr?  We don't know.

This result has consequences in modelling of stellar nucleosynthesis, where the absorption of neutrons is one of the key processes happening in novae and supernovae.  It also means that significant quantities of ⁸⁸Zr in nuclear reactors — created during the fission process, for example — would be a reactor "poison", sucking up the slow neutrons which are the basis of the nuclear chain reaction.  

Plenty to ponder about this result.  

A plot from the paper is shown here.  The large value for zirconium–88 is the second-largest measured ever.  The largest cross-section, in xenon–135 was measured in 1948. 

Quantum Textbook Shelfie

Following a Twitter post from my colleague Jim Al–Khalili yesterday,

Quantum physicists, what are you favourite quantum textbooks? Mine are: 1.Schiff, 2.Messiah, 3.Merzbacher, 4.Bohm and, of course, the very first one ever written: Dirac.

— Jim Al-Khalili (@jimalkhalili) February 28, 2019

and a subsequent round of discussion of the books and which ones we had on our shelves, here is my shelfie of the quantum mechanics textbooks I have on the shelves in my office:

Physics textbooks are the sort of thing I coveted as an Undergraduate but couldn't afford, and now can afford but don't have, or don't make the time, to read.  I've more or less stopped acquiring physics books, though on the occasions that I go to second hand bookstores in college towns, I do sometimes fail to resist the temptation to buy one or two.

Of all the books in the picture here, it's the yellow one whose spine is hard to read – An Introduction to Quantum Physics by A. P. French & E. F. Taylor – that I've had the longest.  My brother bought it for me while I was still a sixth-form school student, who was hoping to go to university for further study (which I duly did).  It was a wonderful and thoughtful present, and I attempted to read it, though I'm not sure I really got very far.  Looking back, I recall what a struggle it was to learn most of undergraduate physics.  Now I can pick up an unseen area of UG physics relatively easily, despite a generally diminished brainpower.  Thinking like a physicist has, I suppose, seeped so far into my unconscious. 

My copy of Pauling & Wilson's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics is a rare one that I saved up for and bought when an undergraduate student (most of the rest I bought later, second hand). Perhaps Pauling and Wilson is not the most suitable for a late-20th-century student, with its presentation unchanged since it was written in 1935. Shortly after I bought my copy, Pauling died, and I have a cut-out of his obituary from the Independent from 22nd August 1994, in the summer before my final year of undergraduate study.

Here's the obituary.  If you click on the picture it should come up in high enough resolution to read.