Prof. Phillipe Collon
Email: pcollon@nd.edu
This project involves a complete upgrade of the electrical and cooling systems of the vacuum pumps, gauges and controllers as well as all control and power systems of the spectrograph and magnets. Improvements will also be made on the beam line. A new detector (ionization chamber and position sensitive PPAC) is also being developed, in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, for the focal plane of the spectrograph. Students will be involved in all parts of this project.

Prof. Umesh Garg
Email: garg@nd.edu
Nuclear Incompressibility is one of the three fundamental quantities characterizing the equation of state of infinite nuclear matter and the only one which has not been measured in a direct experiment. It is critical to our understanding of a wide variety of nuclear and astrophysical phenomena including neutron stars, stellar collapse, supernovae, and collective flow in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. We measure nuclear incompressibility directly by observing the compressional-mode vibrations of atomic nuclei. These experiments are carried out at the Research Center of Nuclear Physics at Osaka University, Osaka, Japan. The REU student will help with data analysis and, possibly, travel to Osaka to help with setting-up the experiment and data taking.

Dr. Larry Lamm
Email: llamm@nd.edu
We are currently in the process of renovating our 100 cm broad range Browne-Buechner spectrograph for use in a series of AMS (accelerator mass spectroscopy) experiments, with operations anticipated in gas-filled mode. However, I would also like to recover standard operation capabilities for this system, by building and testing a variety of position sensitive particle detectors specifically designed to mount on the focal surface of the spectrograph. This project would involve significant "hands-on" work in every aspect of the building and testing of these specialized position sensitive particle detectors, as well as significant participation in the commissioning experiments that would utilize these detectors after their installation within the spectrograph. In addition, the student working on this project would be expected to participate in the development of the electronics to process the signals from the detectors and to gain a working knowledge of the use of our local data acquisition system.

Prof. Xiaodong Tang
Email: x.tang@nd.edu

Three projects are available for undergraduate students. 1) Development of Ionization chamber. This project includes development of gas handling system, construction and test of ionization chamber with radioactive source. 2) Development of digital processing of the signal from nuclear radiation detectors. The detail information from the detectors, captured by a high speed waveform recorder, provides more possibilities and flexibilities to the nuclear physicists compared to traditional analog modules. In this project, the student will work on data taking, DSP programming and neural network. 3) Set up running rabbit system for decay measurement.

Prof. Michael Wiescher
Email: mwiesche@nd.edu
The student will participate in the simulation of stellar fusion reactions at the Notre Dame windowless gas target system. The experiments will focus on the study of the low energy reaction contributions in ²⁰Ne(p,g), a reaction which is important for explosive nucleosynthesis in Ne-novae. The measurements will be performed at the Notre Dame KN accelerator using Ge-clover detectors for measuring the released gamma-radiation.