PHYSICS WITH RADIOACTIVE NUCLEAR BEAMS

Abstract

The rapidly growing research area of radioactive nuclear beam physics is described. The various types of facilities used at present, and planned for the future, are discussed briefly. Then their uses in research in nuclear physics, astrophysics, and in nuclear-solid state applications are discussed. An intense effort in nuclear reaction physics has been directed toward understanding the neutron halo, a completely new result discovered for very neutron rich nuclei via the use of radioactive nuclear beams. Their use has also produced an immense amount of data on nuclear masses, lifetimes, decay modes, multipole moments, and energy levels. Other areas of research in nuclear physics with radioactive nuclear beams are less well developed, but appear to be promising. In nuclear astro-physics, several of the critical reactions of primordial and stellar nucleosynthesis have been studied. In addition, the use of radioactive nuclear beams has already provided dramatically improved definition of some of the processes of nucleosynthesis which operate near the proton and neutron drip lines, with the promise of much more detailed information to come. In more applied reasearch, the interaction between implanted nuclei and solids has often been used as a tool for nuclear physics, but the same studies can also be used to study properties of solids with previously unachievable sensitivity. The results in the past decade from radioactive nuclear beam research have been both vast and varied, but new facilities and intense interest in the research community should provide new information in the future well beyond that which presently exists.