DOE Rare Isotope Facility Opening at Michigan State
The linear accelerator at DOE and Michigan State University’s Facility for Rare Isotope Beams will propel heavy ions toward a target, creating isotopes with unusual characteristics that will then be sorted by magnets into beams for researchers to use.
(FRIB)
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB, pronounced eff-rib) is holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Monday to mark the start of science operations. Located at Michigan State University, FRIB will use accelerators and magnets to synthesize and sort more than 1,000 different isotopes of heavy elements, many of which have never before been created on Earth.
As the Department of Energy’s newest user facility, FRIB will enable a community of some 1,600 scientists to probe mechanisms that bind atomic nuclei together, yielding insights into issues such as nucleus stability and how heavy elements are formed through astrophysical processes.
Rare isotopes researched at the facility may also find applications in fields such as medicine and materials science. In addition, FRIB will produce isotopes that will not be used in research but can still be “harvested” for practical uses. The facility has been undergoing commissioning for the past year and produced its first rare isotopes in December.
This week’s ribbon-cutting will be attended by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who was Michigan’s governor when DOE first announced the project in 2008. While most DOE user facilities are located at national labs, Michigan State was selected because of its strength in nuclear physics and its longstanding role as host of the National Science Foundation-funded National Superconducting Cyclotron Lab, where FRIB is located.
The university contributed $94.5 million to FRIB’s construction, while DOE’s share totaled $635.5 million, and the project was completed on budget and ahead of schedule.
DOE Nuclear Physics program head Tim Hallman reported last week that FRIB has already received 82 proposals from researchers at 130 institutions in 30 countries requesting nearly 10,000 hours of beamtime, which he said well outstrips capacity and underscores the strong international interest in the facility.
He also praised the management of FRIB’s construction, remarking, “This has just been the very model of how projects should be done, a real credit to the MSU team and to the agencies — to both NSF and the DOE — in coordinating this extremely well, much better than normally happens in these circles.”
