The Atom Smasher Effect

At last, an explanation of sorts, for my behaviour in the labs at Tokyo, Incheon, Oxford, Daresbury, Strasbourg et al.

The title of my Thesis was eventually “ Two-proton transfer reactions in the mass-100 region”, an explanation of which follows shortly, Here is the intro to get the mood set:

Atom Smashing.

Everything is made of atoms, but everything is different because there are 92 kinds of atoms, and at least 200 different weights and sizes. It is a good idea to envisage and atom as a little solar system with electrons orbiting a central nucleus. The following relates only to the nucleus.

To find out how all the atoms come together, we had chemists.

To find out why there are 92 different kinds of atom/nucleus etc, we had Atomic Scientists.

To investigate how only 92 came together, we had Nuclear Scientists.

To find out what the 92 nuclei were made of, we had Particle Scientists.

MY area of study comes somewhere between the last two.

I am a Scientist of Nuclear Structure.

My area studies the order behind all 92 atoms, which are officially called elements.
Basically, the question arose, “How is the middle bit of the atom (the nucleus) made up, and is there an order to it?”

To find out, we had to bash the things together.

My analogy is this: Cars. Imagine a long tunnel with an unknown car in the middle. Imagine the only way to find out what it is, was to send into the tunnel unmanned yet known cars at great speeds.

This is a 32-ton Q3D magnetic spectrometer, our "tunnel". The whole thing can be rotated around the target at various angles.
The three blue boxes on the left are huge magnets through which our "tunnel" curves through. The "sample" is the "target" or " unknown car" and is where the smashing takes place.
How do we find out what the unknown car is? We lie in wait at the other end of the tunnel and look at what bits come out. For me, it is the light blue line just after the last of the magnets.
The idea is the same in principle with my branch of physics, only the "cars" (0r "target") are replaced by atomic nuclei.
BUT we still wait at the other end to look at the debris. (that blue line)

Our "target" is our unknown car, and the "focal surface/plane" (the blue line) is the other end of the "tunnel".

After many hours and days of computing and analysis, we get something like this:

These pictures are roughly similar to diffraction patterns seen from light experiments. Note the angle along the bottom axis.
We rotate the spectrometer so that the aperture lies at different angles to the incoming beam, much like a normal spectrometer with a diffraction grating.

The solid and dotted lines are the predictions, the dots are the points seen from the end of the "tunnel".

The numbers are labels for us to tell what we are looking at.

It can be seen that sometimes the theory is good, whereas my results looked nothing like as accurate.

What is the overall picture? The work here is not actually my work, but is very similar, but both this and mine show that our ideas about what happens inside the nucleus are fairly accurate, but in some places, difficult to understand, rather like some of the effects of general relativity (at large masses), and special relativity (at large speeds).

The pictures above where there are solid lines but no dots are a graphic representation that we do NOT know all.

If you imagine this to be a diffraction pattern, with intensity of the "light" being the bumps, as seen from the side.

What was MY contribution? Over the five years I produced over 20 of these, each point representing a "run" on single angle measurement. As each was measured, it often took 2 hours to accumulate enough data to get a single dot.

What did MY data prove? The theory says that there are certain boundaries in the nucleus that like to be "full", a bit like electrons in atoms. My thesis proved there was one at 60 neutrons.

We used two proton transfer reactions . (Oxygen in (8 protons), Carbon out (6 protons)). Mass-100 region means the target had typically100 protons, and we used Molybdenum, Ruthenium, Cadmium, and Palladium amongst others.

My job in Korea will be to continue this work.

My job in Geneva? I will be manager of a project to collect not just ONE angle of data per run, but three, a project adopted by many labs across Europe. it is called SSA (Split-Slit Aperture)

The idea itself? My own!