Physics of the nucleus
The School operates the premier facility in Australia for accelerator-based research in physics of the nucleus. These facilities are centred on the 14UD electrostatic heavy-ion accelerator and a new modular superconducting linear accelerator booster. The accelerators feed a variety of experiments and instrumentation, enabling the study of:
- Fusion and Fission Dynamics with Heavy Ions
- Nuclear Spectroscopy
- Nuclear Moments and Hyperfine Fields
- Perturbed Angular Correlations and Hyperfine Interactions applied to Materials
- Heavy Ion Elastic Recoil Detection Analysis (ERDA)
- Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS)
Selected research highlights
Potential student research projects
You could be doing your own research into fusion and plasma confinement. Below are some examples of student physics research projects available in RSPE.
Please browse our full list of available physics research projects to find a project that interests you.
The lifetimes of excited quantum states in the atomic nucleus give extremely important information about nuclear structure and the shape of the nucleus. This project will commission a new array of of LaBr3 detectors to measure nuclear lifetimes, with the aim to replace conventional analog electronics with digital signal processing.
This project will develop key aspects of the SABRE dark matter detector model, and investigate the detector's sensitivity to dark matter and backgrounds.
Analytic solutions of real-world quantum mechanics problems are rare, and in practise we must use numerical methods to obtain solutions. This project will give you practical experience in solving the static and time-dependent Schrödinger equations using a computer.
Motivated by exciting prospects for measurements of the magnetism of rare isotopes produced by the new radioactive beam accelerators internationally, this computational project seeks to understand the enormous magnetic fields produced at the nucleus of highly charged ions by their atomic electron configuration.
