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We can study nuclei by scattering particles off them. In fact, we all do this everyday when we see things! In your classroom to read your book, the light particles from the bulbs (the beam) hit your textbook (the target), interact with it (the reaction), and scatter into your eyeball (the detector). From these particles, you can get information about the textbook (reading!).

Similarly, to study nuclei, we have to scatter particles off them, and detect the scattered particles. Because the nuclei I study are radioactive, I have to scatter particles very quickly before it changes into something else!

The scattering reactions I look at are called “transfer reactions”. This is where a proton or neutron is transferred from one particle to another in a nuclear reaction. We can measure the energy and momentum of the particles that land in our detectors, and work out what the nuclear structure is like.

We can use the nuclear structure to learn more about how nuclei behave. This improves our understanding of nuclear physics, which can then be applied to cancer treatment, nuclear power, how stars work and so on!

I work at the ISOLDE facility at CERN. Here, we create radioactive nuclei that have very short lifetimes (often less than a second!). We fire these radioactive nuclei at our target, where a single neutron or proton is transferred in our transfer reaction. We have to fire them very fast before they change — they travel at about 20% of the speed of light!

The target is placed in an old MRI magnet, which is like a big tube that people can lie inside. They are normally used to take pictures of the body with the strong magnetic field. We use them to contain all the particles that fly out in our reaction, and direct them onto detectors. I have to be very careful that I don’t have anything metal in my hands or pockets when I stand nearby. Otherwise, they get sucked out of my hand and would damage the equipment!

I’m interested in magnesium atoms that have different numbers of neutrons. Stable magnesium has only 12 neutrons, but I’ve been investigating the nuclear structure of magnesium isotopes with 17 and 19 neutrons. Here is a that I created for a competition where scientists present their research to politicians. It contains more information about how the detector works:

https://imascientist.org.uk/wp-content/blogs.dir/505/files/2022/11/stem_for_britain_poster_edit.pdf