Two US Labs Vie for delayed exotic nuclei source
Science: The US Department of Energy (DOE) will accept proposals this week for a Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), an accelerator to make fleeting nuclei never before produced outside stellar explosions. Gelbke and colleagues want to build FRIB at Michigan State's National
Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, a facility already pursuing such work with 300 employees and an annual budget of $20 million from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). But researchers from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois also want to host the machine. Argonne is a DOE lab with a staff of 2800 and a $530 million budget. DOE says
it will decide by year's end.
Comments
Reading the above summary regarding the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), made my day.
Producing never before observed isotopes of not only known elements, but also of never before observed super-heavy elements can help us obtain a better understanding of the strong and weak nuclear forces, and may even help us better interpret anomalies that hint at existence of additional nuclear forces.
The real point I am trying to convey is that for every new advance in particle physics accelerator apparatus, there remains the chance for the observation of exotic new behavior for which we can only speculate as to it useful applications to technology.
Posted by: James M. Essig | July 21, 2008 10:41 PM