Advanced Radioactive Ion Beam Facility

Exciting opportunities for research in nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics and for understanding of fundamental symmetries in nature will open up with Radioactive Ion Beams (RIB). Using RIB as a tool the endeavor will be to explore hitherto unreachable regions of the nuclear landscape via 3 systematic experimental studies of Exotic Nuclei. This will be possible by exploiting the iso-spin degree of freedom of radioactive beams. We may also expect to discover new phenomena and to develop a better predictability in the theoretical description of the structure and interactions of nuclei. The fact that almost all major accelerator laboratories in the world are constructing RIB facilities points towards the strong scientific motivation in the research and applications with these beams.

Study of explosive stellar events, nucleo-synthesis, structure of exotic nuclei, limits of particle stability, synthesis and study of neutron-rich RIB important for production of Super Heavy Elements (SHE), material science with rare isotope beams are few of the research areas that will be targeted.

A RIB facility involves extensive R&D and requires the development of a number of state-of-art accelerator components for the acceleration and mass separation of radioactive beams, e.g., online ECR ion-source and two-ion-source (charge breeder) concept, Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) and IH-LINACs and thick target technology. All the major laboratories in the world are pursuing ambitious projects for developing Radioactive Ion Beam facilities e.g. the RIKEN RI Beam factory Project at Japan, RIA (Rare Isotope Accelerator) facility in USA, ISAC at TRIUMF Canada and SPIRAL at GANIL, France, just to name a few. However, technologically the development of a RIB facility is extremely challenging and so is the development of special detectors/ experimental facilities for the use of RI Beams.

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Exciting opportunities for research in nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics and for understanding of fundamental symmetries in nature will open up with Radioactive Ion Beams (RIB). Using RIB as a tool the endeavor will be to explore hitherto unreachable regions of the nuclear landscape via systematic experimental studies of Exotic Nuclei. This will be possible by exploiting the iso-spin degree of freedom of radioactive beams. We may also expect to discover new phenomena and to develop a better predictability in the theoretical description of the structure and interactions of nuclei. The fact that almost all major accelerator laboratories in the world are constructing RIB facilities points towards the strong scientific motivation in the research and applications with these beams.

Project Co-ordinator : Dr. Alok Chakraborty

Email : alok@veccal.ernet.in