Europe to build state of the art laboratory

One of the great ongoing challenges of astrophysics, to find out how stars evolve and die, is to be tackled in an ambitious European research programme. This will involve studying in the laboratory over 25 critical nuclear reactions using low-energy stable beams of ions, in order to understand stellar evolution. “This programme will enhance the ongoing effort to understand the lifecycle of stars, together with the structure and processes of stellar evolution,” said the workshop’s convenor Sotirios Harissopulos from the National Centre of Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece . “We also want to try and understand what happens when stars explode and how heavy elements are produced as a result.”

Although astrophysicists have been studying these questions for half a century, progress has been held back by the experimental difficulties involved. But now there is the opportunity to exploit new technology to build a major laboratory that would propel Europe to the head of the field of stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis. “We now want to build a state of the art facility to disentangle all these problems,” said Harissopulos.

The framework for this research programme was evaluated at a recent workshop, “The future of stable beams in Nuclear Astrophysics”, organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF). The workshop highlighted the urgent need to build a laboratory where state of the art instrumentation could be hosted, at a cost of less than 10 million Euros. “Unfortunately, leading nuclear astrophysics laboratories in Europe fulfilling these requirements are already closed or will be closed in the near future, while others have been “transformed” into analytical laboratories or irradiation facilities in order to survive in a highly competitive environment, where the demand for industrial applications has washed out many basic research activities in the field of low-energy nuclear physics,” said Harissopulos. “As a result, a flagship facility providing intense stable beams for nuclear astrophysics studies in Europe is missing and, hence, there is an urgent need for Europe to create a new state-of-the art facility equipped with advanced detection techniques.”

Europe already has Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) facilities to study various scenarios in which nucleosynthesis occurs in explosive stellar environments. The new planned facility based on stable ion beams would complement these existing sites and enable a much more complete picture of stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis to be built up.