Job no: 706664
Work type: Faculty/Academic Staff
Major Administrative Unit / College: Facility For Rare Isotope Beams
Department: Facility For Rare Isotope Beams 10049299
Sub Area: FAS- Fac./Acad Staff
Salary: Salary Commensurate with Experience
Location: East Lansing
Categories: Full Time (90-100%), Fixed Term Academic Staff, Research/Scientific, Non-Union

Position Summary

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) will be a new national user facility for nuclear science, funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC), Michigan State University (MSU), and the State of Michigan. Under construction on the site of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) on the MSU campus and to be operated by MSU, FRIB will provide intense beams of rare isotopes (that is, short-lived nuclei not normally found on Earth). FRIB will continue to enable scientists to make discoveries about the properties of these rare isotopes in order to better understand the physics of nuclei, nuclear astrophysics, fundamental interactions, and applications for society.

This position offers an exciting opportunity to become part of the world-class FRIB community, and to get involved in planning and conducting experiments at this emerging national user facility that will expand nuclear science into a whole new realm of possibility.

The successful candidate will have the unique opportunity to make major contributions to designing, building, commissioning, and running the first scientific experiments with, the Particle X-ray Coincidence Technique (PXCT) detection system for nuclear astrophysics. PXCT will use various solid-state detector technologies to measure radiations (X-rays, gamma rays, protons, and alpha particles) associated with the electron-capture decays of proton-rich nuclides in FRIB’s thermalized rare-isotope beam area. The data will be used to constrain the energies, spins, parities, lifetimes, and branching ratios of unbound states: the ingredients needed to determine the rates of key thermonuclear reactions and photodisintegrations in explosive astrophysical environments such as supernovae and X-ray bursts on accreting neutron stars. These rates will be used to simulate astrophysical observables associated with nucleosynthesis and/or energy generation in collaboration with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics – Center for the Evolution of the Elements (JINA-CEE). Opportunities will also be available to contribute to experiments using other systems including the Gaseous Detector with Germanium Tagging TPC (GADGET II) at FRIB and the Doppler Shift Lifetimes 2 (DSL2) setup at TRIUMF.

For more information, please visit: MSU Careers Details - Research Associate-Fixed Term.