Physics of the nucleus

Related departments

Department of Nuclear Physics

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)

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.

Nuclear batteries: Energy-storage applications of nuclear isomers

Nuclear metastable states, known colloquially as isomers, have energy densities millions of times greater than chemical batteries. This project investigates nuclear pathways for reliably extracting this energy from candidate isotopes on demand.

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Characterisation and optimisation of an ionization detector system for probing dissipation effects

Characterisation and optimisation of ionization detector system for probing dissipation effects in multi-nucleon transfer reactions

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Measuring and modelling free-ion hyperfine fields

Motivated by exciting prospects for measurements of the magnetism of rare isotopes produced by the new radioactive beam accelerators internationally, this experimental and computational project seeks to understand the enormous magnetic fields produced at the nucleus...

» Find out more about this project