The production of beams of radioactive nuclei has resulted in opportunities for addressing many open questions in nuclear structure, nuclear astrophysics, and fundamental symmetries. For over three decades, the TwinSol separator at the University of Notre Dame has produced high-quality in-flight radioactive beams of both proton-rich and neutron-rich nuclei [1]. The TwinSol separator was...
Neutron-rich, heavy, EXotic nuclei around the neutron shell closure at N=126 and in the transfermium region are accessible via multinucleon Transfer reactions which feature relative high cross-sections. However, the wide angular distributions of the multinucleon transfer products lead to experimental challenges in the separation and identification of the transfer products.
In order to...
A better understanding of neutron inelastic scattering on fissioning isotopes is crucial due to their broad use in applications. Inaccuracies between previously measured experimental data [1,2,3] and the theoretical approaches of the inelastic channel may lead to inadequate reliability in the models. Our goal is to improve the $^{238}$U(n, n'γ) cross-section via neutron-γ coincidences using...
The hypertriton is predicted to have a small binding energy (a weighted average of 170 keV), consistent with a large matter radius (~ 10 fm) and similar to historical 11Li halo discovered more than 35 years ago. But the experimental values of the binding energy of the hypertriton range from 50 to 500 keV. In this work I discuss the electromagnetic response and interaction radius of the...
The Modular Total Absorption Spectrometer (MTAS) [1] was built and commissioned at Oak Ridge National Laboratory just over ten years ago. In the decade since, many experiments that impact a wide range of fundamental and applied physics topics have been reported with MTAS [2-6].
MTAS is a NaI based detector array made of 19 different modules with a total mass of about 1 ton and an almost 4pi...
Studying the $\beta$ decay of indium-133 is of great significance for both nuclear structure and astrophysics. On one hand, $^{133}$In is a perfect $\beta$-decay demonstrator of $r$-process nuclei in the vicinity of $N=82$ owing to its extreme neutron-proton asymmetry and thus large Q$_\beta$ windows. On the other hand, its decay daughter, $^{133}$Sn, is simple in its structure due to its...
Phosphorus, Sulphur and Chlorine isotopes with neutron number around 28 belong to a region of deformation and shape co-existence inspite of accepted N=28 shell gap, mainly because of the quenching of the N = 28 shell gap at this high isospin and the near degeneracy of the proton “sd” s_1/2 and d_3/2 orbitals. At these extreme values of isospin, microscopic structural effects, such as the...
The N=20 island of inversion, so called due to the disappearance of the N=20 magic number, has consistently been one of the most exciting nuclear regions since its discovery 30 years ago. Since then, further experimental and theoretical studies have explained the origin of this anomaly from the presence of deformed two-particle two-hole components in the ground state wavefunctions of nuclei in...
