Ani Aprahamian

Professor
Experimental Nuclear Physics

Research Interests

…“we are all made of star stuff” is a quote from Carl Sagan to reflect the fact that each constituent atom of our bodies have been processed through many generations of stars, numerous supernova explosions, and/or thermonuclear reactions in binary star systems or the interiors of massive stars before they were ejected into space and eventually condensed to form us in our solar system. Nuclear reactions are the main engines that drive these processes. Nuclear decay lifetimes set the time-scales for the explosions, nuclear reactions determine how brightly a star glows, and the available nuclear fuel along with the weak interaction that can determine how long our sun will last.

My research focuses on the study of these nuclear structure effects (shapes, masses, decay lifetimes, and probabilities) and how they can influence stellar processes. This research is a part of the new NSF JINA (Joint Institute of Nuclear Astrophysics) frontier center to address the fate of nuclei under extreme conditions such as accretion disks of binary neutron star systems, or shock fronts of core collapse supernovae. The experiments are carried out by studying nuclei via radioactive ion beams at ND using the TWINSOL facility, the NSCL facility at MSU, the HRIBF facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and ATLAS at Argonne National Laboratory.

Selected Publications:

“Nuclear Astrophysics: a new era,” Physics World, 33 (2002).

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