Philippe Collon

Research Interests

His research work involves the development of detection techniques using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). AMS has traditionally been used to detect environmental tracers at and below their natural abundance levels (¹⁰Be, ¹⁴C, ³⁶Cl,… ). Its main attribute is its power to accelerate and analyze ions of radioactive nuclei with extremely high sensitivity. However many aspects of this powerful technique cannot only be used for research involving radioactive-beam physics, but also used to study nuclear reactions which, under stellar conditions, involve in most cases very low counting rates and high isobaric backgrounds.

Prof. Collon has been developing AMS for noble gas tracers and is presently working on applying this technique to study nuclear reactions of interest in stellar nucleosynthesis. He is also involved in the development of a high intensity, low energy ion source that will be used to measure reaction rates in conditions much closer to those prevailing in stellar environments than previously.