Colloquium

Nuclear Physics in the Post 9/11 Era.
Educating First Responders
and
Stewardship Science: New Results on Fission Using Surrogate Reactions

Professor C.W. Beausang
University of Richmond

Wednesday, November 15, 2006   4:00 p.m.  NSH 118

(Refreshments at 3:30 p.m. NSH 202)

 

In this presentation I shall cover two very different topics. In this first part of my talks I will present some details of outreach courses presented to first responders at Yale. Following the events of 9/11 2001 many first responders, firefighters, police, US Customs offices and others were tasked, with a new urgency, of interdicting radioactive materials, dirty bombs etc., as they entered the country. This is a considerable challenge.  One way the civilian nuclear science community can respond is to help educate the first responders in basic nuclear physics and detector technology.

In the second part of my talk I shall turn to physics and discuss some recent experiments to utilize the surrogate reaction technique to deduce neutron induced cross sections on unstable nuclei. Such reactions play important roles in nuclear astrophysics and in stewardship science. However, for nuclei with moderate or short half lives, target production is very difficult or impossible and the intense radiation fluxes from such targets often exclude direct measurements. The surrogate technique attempts to bypass this problem by producing the same compound system with similar excitation energy and angular momentum but using a stable beam and target combination. Following a brief review of the method I will review some of our latest results on fission of actinide nuclei.