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Life, Health and Physical Sciences
How the
universe works?
Nuclear physics is the world of
protons, neutrons, quarks and
gluons, strong interactions and
mass numbers, and it is a field that
has an impact on our everyday
lives. Scientists at the University
of Brighton are at the heart of
international collaborations
focusing on a fundamental
understanding of how the atomic
building blocks of the universe were
created and how they behave.
Nuclear physics may be a complex and
mysterious world, but the fruits of the basic
science are all around us. Nuclear power
generates a sixth of the UK’s electricity, MRI
scanners are an everyday part of medical
diagnosis, and TV archaeology would be
frustratingly incomplete without radiocarbon
dating.
“We’re doing blue-skies academic research at
the University of Brighton,” said Professor Alison
Bruce, leader of the university’s Nuclear Physics
Research Group. “We’re working on important
building blocks of knowledge that are helping to
inform the general picture of nuclear physics.”
Today, nuclear physics in the UK is centred
on worldwide collaborations. The University
of Brighton’s nuclear physics scientists work
closely with the University of Surrey, making
joint use of facilities in Japan. Each university
leads on certain areas, applying for ‘beam-time’
– use of facilities at other institutions – and then
controlling experiments and results.
Radioactive Ion Beams (RIBs) are a new
direction for nuclear physics, with RIBs under
construction in Germany, Japan and the US.
Nuclear scientists from the UK will be working
with German colleagues on a facility currently
being built at Darmstadt and staff from the
University of Brighton are working on the
detector systems for the new centre.
“We can now study in the laboratory a range of
nuclear reactions that take place in exploding
stars,” said Professor Bruce. “We’ll be able to
understand how the chemical elements that
we find on Earth were formed and distributed
through the universe. RIBs use intense beams
of chemical elements and ‘in-flight’ separation
can provide any isotope, independently of
the chemical properties of the element. The
production process is fast, and that results in
beams of the shortest-lived, most exotic nuclei
which are the key academic focus when it
comes to testing the models we have for how
protons and neutrons behave in the nucleus.”
The by-product is that the exotic nuclei
researchers are studying are also produced in
nuclear fission reactors that produce power,
so, for example, an understanding of how
heat is produced by the fission fragments has
direct applications in areas such as how long a
nuclear power reactor needs to be left to cool
down before maintenance can be carried out.
“Although we’re an academic research group
looking at big science, we also provide an
excellent training environment for our research
students and staff,” said Professor Bruce, “many
of whom go on to work in the nuclear power
industry, helping to fill the current skills gap.”
The ultimate goal of nuclear physics is to create
a model that works for all nuclei in all states. A
single unified description will mean that scientists
have a fundamental understanding of all the
forces that act on subatomic particles and will
take them a big step closer to understanding the
universe and the world around us.
“Our principal motivation is the basic science,
and we contribute strongly to the world sum of
knowledge and understanding,” said Professor
Bruce. “But blue-skies research in nuclear
physics has the potential to tackle growing
energy demands and create radical new medical
therapies. We want to understand the universe,
but we can contribute to a better world as we
get there.”
Photograph: Three
germanium detectors
measuring the gamma-rays
emitted by zirconium nuclei
as they decay.