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The Department of Nuclear Physics

The Department of Nuclear Physics is one of the seven Departments which make up the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the ANU.

The Department operates the premier facility in Australia for accelerator-based research in nuclear physics. Most areas of research are complementary and overlap in terms of both shared techniques and in providing an understanding of interrelated aspects of nuclear structure and nuclear interactions. The facilities are centred on the 14UD electrostatic heavy-ion accelerator and a new modular superconducting linear accelerator booster that substantially increases the mass range of heavy ions that can be accelerated above the Coulomb barrier.

The accelerators feed a variety of experiments and instrumentation, enabling the study of:

The dynamics of heavy ion reactions and the nuclei so formed, particularly through the competing processes of particle evaporation and fission. Fusion and fission dynamical timescales; nuclear viscosity; dependence on angular momentum, nuclear ground-state shapes and level densities at high temperature.

High-resolution, time-correlated g-ray and electron conversion nuclear spectroscopy; identification and characterisation of new, very neutron-deficient nuclei; shape coexistence; high-spin states; high-spin isomers; competition and transition between single-particle and collective excitations.

Configurational structure of nuclear levels through measurement of nuclear gyromagnetic ratios using external and internal magnetic fields. Studies of transient and static hyperfine magnetic fields acting on ions in ferromagnetic materials. Nuclear quadrupole moments by perturbed angular distributions caused by electric field gradients in non-cubic crystals.

Accelerator mass spectrometry is used for many dating and tracing applications in the fields of archaeology, geology, hydrology and bio medicine.

Materials: Implantation of radioactive nuclear species with known nuclear moments to probe the local electric and magnetic fields in solids. Application to the study of semiconductor materials.

Much more information about The Department of Nuclear Physics, is available on the Department's own web pages.