The primary goals of the proposed research program are to exploit the two premier new radioactive beam facilities, namely the US ATLAS-CARIBU facility at Argonne, and the Canadian ISAC2 facility at TRIUMF, in order to probe unusual nuclear structure phenomena in unexplored regions of neutron-rich nuclei far from stability. A second goal is to explore the fundamental properties and underlying nuclear structure leading to the existence of long-lived highly-excited isomeric state and to elucidate the feasibility of achieving stimulated depopulation of isomeric states for controllable release of stored energy which could have broad applications.
This program at ATLAS will exploit the Rochester 4p heavy-ion detector CHICO, plus Gammasphere, this nation's premier high-resolution gamma-ray facility. The Rochester/LLNL Bambino heavy-ion detector system will be used with the new Tigress high-resolution tracking gamma-ray facility at ISAC2. The important developments of CHICO and Bambino, contributions to Gammasphere, and the techniques of Coulomb excitation, heavy-ion induced transfer, and fission-fragment spectroscopy, are the culmination of many years of effort at Rochester. Cline will continue to be involved in the development of GRETA, the next generation high-resolution gamma-ray detector technology that employs the new concept of tracking the location and energy of every gamma-ray interaction. Such detectors will provide a resolving power that is orders of magnitude better than currently available, enabling studies that at present are inaccessible to nuclear science. Besides having an enormous impact on nuclear science, the potential impact of such gamma-ray tracking and imaging detectors will be considerable to a wide range of applications, including astrophysics, medicine, industry, and nuclear safeguards. The proposed research program will be an ideal environment for graduate and post-doctoral education.
