Tue·Feb 7, 2023Tuesday·February 7, 2023

1. 01*

   Opportunities for Fundamental Physics Research with Radioactive Molecules

   Gordon Arrowsmith-Kron🇺🇸 · Michail Athanasakis-Kaklamanakis🇨🇭 · Mia Au🇨🇭 · Jochen Ballof🇨🇭 · Robert Berger🇩🇪 · Anastasia Borschevsky🇳🇱 · Alexander A. Breier🇩🇪 · Fritz Buchinger🇨🇦 · Dmitry Budker🇩🇪 · Luke Caldwell🇺🇸 · Christopher Charles🇨🇦 · Nike Dattani🇨🇦 and 50 other authors

   Molecules containing short-lived, radioactive nuclei are uniquely positioned to enable a wide range of scientific discoveries in the areas of fundamental symmetries, astrophysics, nuclear structure, and chemistry. Recent advances in the ability to create, cool, and control complex molecules down to the quantum level, along with recent and upcoming advances in radioactive species production at several facilities around the world, create a compelling opportunity to coordinate and combine these efforts to bring precision measurement and control to molecules containing extreme nuclei. In this manuscript, we review the scientific case for studying radioactive molecules, discuss recent atomic, molecular, nuclear, astrophysical, and chemical advances which provide the foundation for their study, describe the facilities where these species are and will be produced, and provide an outlook for the future of this nascent field.

   nucl-exnucl-thphysics.atom-phRept.Prog.Phys.(2024)·82 citations
2. 02*

   Cross section measurement of the 144Sm(alpha,n)147Gd reaction for studying the alpha-nucleus optical potential at astrophysical energies

   Gy. Gyürky🇭🇺 · P. Mohr🇭🇺 · A. Angyal · Z. Halász🇭🇺 · G.G. Kiss🇭🇺 · Zs. Mátyus · T.N. Szegedi🇭🇺 · T. Szücs🇭🇺 · Zs. Fülöp

   Nuclear reactions involving alpha particles play an important role in various astrophysical processes such as the gamma-process of heavy element nucleosynthesis. The poorly known low-energy alpha-nucleus optical (AOMP) potential is a key parameter to estimate the rates of these reactions. The AOMP can be tested by measuring the cross section of alpha-scattering as well as alpha-induced reactions. Low energy elastic alpha-scattering on 144Sm has recently been measured with high precision. The aim of the present work was to complement that work by measuring the (a,n) cross sections on 144Sm at low energies. The experimental data shall be used to constrain the AOMP. From this potential the 144Sm(a,g)148Gd reaction rate can be derived with reduced uncertainties. The 144Sm(a,n)147Gd reaction was studied by bombarding Sm targets with alpha-beams provided by the cyclotron accelerator of Atomki. The cross section was determined using the activation method. The gamma-radiation following the decay of the 147Gd reaction product was measured with a HPGe detector. The experimental data are analyzed within the statistical model. The cross section was measured in the alpha-energy range between 13 and 20 MeV in 1 MeV steps, i.e., from close above the (a,n) threshold. The results were compared with statistical model calculations using various approaches and parametrizations for the AOMP, and excellent agreement was obtained for two recent potentials. However, these potentials cannot reproduce literature data for the 144Sm(a,g)148Gd reaction with the same accuracy. Constraints for the AOMP were derived from an analysis of the new 144Sm(a,n)147Gd data and literature data for 144Sm(a,g)148Gd. These constraints enable a determination of the reaction rate of the 144Sm(a,g)148Gd reaction with significantly reduced uncertainties of less than a factor of two.

   nucl-exastro-ph.SRnucl-thPRC(2023)·8 citations
3. 03*

   Neutron capture-induced silicon nuclear recoils for dark matter and CE$\nu$NS

   K. Harris🇺🇸 · A. Gevorgian🇺🇸 · A.J. Biffl🇺🇸 · A.N. Villano🇺🇸

   Following neutron capture in a material there will be prompt nuclear recoils in addition to the gamma cascade. The nuclear recoils that are left behind in materials are generally below 1\,keV and therefore in the range of interest for dark matter experiments and CE$\nu$NS studies--both as backgrounds and calibration opportunities. Here we obtain the spectrum of prompt nuclear recoils following neutron capture for silicon.

   ↳ hep-exnucl-exPRD(2023)·5 citations
4. 04*

   Probing the jet transport coefficient of cold nuclear matter in electron-ion collisions

   Peng Ru🇨🇳 · Zhong-Bo Kang🇺🇸 · Enke Wang🇨🇳 · Hongxi Xing🇨🇳 · Ben-Wei Zhang🇨🇳

   We present a study of the nuclear-medium induced transverse momentum broadening of particle production in future electron-ion-collision~(EIC) experiments. By considering the multiple scattering between hard partons and cold nuclear medium within the higher-twist factorization framework in perturbative QCD, we calculate the transverse momentum broadening of single hadron production in semi-inclusive measurements, as well as the nuclear enhancement of the transverse momentum imbalance for di-hadron and heavy-meson pair productions. In particular, a kinematics dependent non-perturbative jet transport coefficient $\hat{q}=\hat{q}(x,Q^2)$ extracted in a global analysis of the current data, together with its uncertainty determined with a Hessian method, are input into our calculations and are available for the community. Significant kinematic and color-state dependences of the nuclear induced broadening/imbalance are predicted. Our results indicate that the future EIC measurements are able to provide powerful constraints on the kinematic dependence of the transport coefficient $\hat{q}$ and thus greatly facilitate the jet tomography of cold nuclear medium.

   ↳ nucl-thhep-exhep-phnucl-ex6 citations
5. 05*

   Development of energy calibration and data analysis systems for the NUCLEUS experiment

   Giorgio Del Castello🇮🇹

   Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) opens new approaches for the search of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The NUCLEUS experiment aims to use the intense antineutrino flux produced from nuclear reactor cores to perform measurements of the CEvNS cross-section via gram-scale ultra-low threshold cryogenic detectors. A common problem with low threshold detectors is the calibration, since most radioactive sources tend to saturate the dynamical range of the sensors. In this dissertation, a photon-statistic based optical calibration setup has been developed and tested using detectors from the BULLKID R&D project. Both the developed hardware setup and the relative control software allow to automatically perform a full calibration of an array of detectors. During the development of this work, the DIANA analysis framework, developed for the CUORE experiment, has been compatibilized with the NUCLEUS DAQ and a new automatic analysis protocol was developed using the data from the NUCLEUS prototype runs. This protocol proved to be accurate at reproducing the results obtained via a model dependent study performed with an almost event by event inspection that was carried out in the early stages of NUCLEUS. Particular focus was given to the development of an event reconstruction procedure used to measure the energy of events that lie outside the linear response region of the detector. The last activity done for the NUCLEUS experiment was to develop a python based toolkit for the study of the discovery potential of the experiment. This toolkit was originally developed in the early stages of NUCLEUS by J.Rothe and has been intensely upgraded during the work presented in this thesis, in order to deal with different types of statistical checks and procedures.

   ↳ physics.ins-detnucl-ex8 citations
6. 06*

   TOUCANS: a versatile Monte Carlo neutron transport code based on Geant4

   L. Thulliez🇫🇷 · B. Mom🇫🇷 · E. Dumonteil🇫🇷

   This paper reports the development of TOUCANS, a new Monte Carlo neutron transport code fully written using the Geant4 toolkit. It aims at modeling complex systems easily and rapidly, thanks to a simple key-value input file. While its main focus is the transport of low energy neutrons -- below 20 MeV -- using evaluated cross-section libraries, it also takes advantage of the state-of-the-art capabilities offered by Geant4 regarding the modeled cross-sections for practically all particles at all energies. Hence it gives access to non-specialists to a wide variety of applications involving different particles, such as for instance the simulation of compact accelerator based neutron sources (CANS) which initially motivated its development. It leverages on recent implementations performed within Geant4 to provide both shielding calculation capabilities (using Adaptive Multilevel Splitting, which is a fully automated variance reduction technique) and criticality calculation capabilities (to estimate the keff of a multiplicative system). It also benefits from a tight coupling with CADMesh to readily import CAD models, with NCrystal to extend the support of thermal neutron transport to crystals, with FIFRELIN to increase compound nucleus de-excitation accuracy, and with FUNZ to provide to the user parametric simulation capabilities (such as multi-objective algorithms, calculation of Pareto sets, etc). Thanks to recent improvements of the neutron physics within the Geant4 Neutron-HP package, the TOUCANS code can be considered on-par with industrial neutron transport codes such as Tripoli-4 or MCNP in term of neutron physics accuracy. Its sources should be released soon amongst Geant4 advanced examples.

   ↳ physics.acc-phnucl-exnucl-thphysics.comp-phNucl.Instrum.Meth.A(2023)·4 citations

* Reconstructed cohort: no mailing for this day survives in the archive. Papers are grouped by their submission times and arXiv's announcement cut-off, assuming announcement without delay; positions follow identifier order. Validated at ~91% exact-day agreement against the archived era.