“38-Day Journey of Man-made 56Ni Isotope at Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE)”

General ILL seminar

organised by College 3

Thursday, 3 July 2025 at 10h30

Seminar room 110-111, ILL 50, 1st floor

Zoom link:https://ill.zoom.us/j/98964195699?pwd=vPhNT17CAeoDUr7QX4PjfyPnWsHuMU.1

Password:SeminarC3

----------------

“38-Day Journey of Man-made 56Ni Isotope at Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE)”

Hye Young Lee

Physics Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM, USA

To further enhance our understanding of nuclear reactions on radioactive isotopes relevant for applications such as astrophysics and national missions, we need to extend our capability of accessing radionuclides from today’s reach. The Isotope Production Facility at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) produces short-lived isotopes such as 56Ni with a half life of6 days, which was used for the first direct measurement of the (n,p) reaction cross section using the hotLENZ (radioactive Low Energy NZ) instrument at fast neutron energies. Measured crosssections and deduced reaction rates were validated with theoretical predictions. The astrophysical calculations using the experimentally deduced LANL reaction rate conformed the 56Ni acted as neutron poison during the np process nucleosynthesis in neutrino-driven wind core-collapse supernova. With this 56Ni rate being constrained, we studied the impacts of other experimentally updated rates that influence the path of heavy element productions in np process, to answer our knowledge gap in p-nuclei abundance discrepancy to the observations. I will conclude this talk with the ongoing effort of developing the optimized solenoid spectrometer for improving the fidelity of directly measured reaction data on radionuclides.
 

This work benefits from the LANSCE accelerator facility and is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contracts DE-AC52-06NA25396, the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of Los Alamos National Laboratory under project numbers 20130758ECR and 20180228ER, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science-Nuclear Physics.

Hanno Filter (College 3 Secretary)