President's Showcase
Ana Pereira they/them
Supervising Professor: Vandana Tripathi
Ana Pereira, a Brazilian-American from Miami, FL, is a senior majoring in physics. Actively engaged on campus, Ana contributes as an FGLSAMP member, UROP Leader, and ACE Tutor. With aspirations of earning a PhD in experimental nuclear physics, Ana aims to become a physics professor, dedicated to nurturing a collaborative research community and advancing our understanding of physical phenomena.
Abstract
About 3000 isotopes can be found in the chart of nuclides, but only approximately 300 are stable. The remaining isotopes may decay to a more stable nucleus via alpha decay, beta decay, or fission for the very heavy ones. Both stable and unstable nuclei can be excited to characteristic energetic states. These states can be described by their energy and angular momentum: properties which provide insight into the behavior of the strong nuclear force. An excited nucleus may de-excite to the ground state by emitting gamma rays. Gamma rays carry energy and angular momentum: information which can be translated to insight into nuclear structure. At the John D. Fox Laboratory, a team of nuclear physicists maintain a dedicated effort towards discovering and characterizing nuclei using various experimental techniques: including gamma-ray spectroscopy. In a reaction between projectile oxygen-18 nuclei kept at 55 MeV and target titanium-50, excited copper-65 is produced in about 8% abundance. The target chamber—where the reaction occurs—is surrounded by an array of 9 high purity germanium (HPGe) detectors at varied angles. The goal of this project is to discover new and verify the energy and angular momentum assignments to the excited states of copper-65. Preliminary results do not show evidence of any new excited states, but verification of angular momentum in existing states is possible using ratio analysis between the relative intensity of a gamma ray at different detector angles.
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