Science Research

CeNAM Science Research

CeNAM fosters sustained collaboration of scientists across various fields to address fundamental scientific questions about the cosmos at the intersection of nuclear science, geochemistry, and astronomy. These questions include: 

  • What drives the many changes we observe in the night sky with modern telescopes and detectors such as explosions of stars or star quakes?
  • What is physics like deep inside the most extreme environments in the cosmos such as colliding neutron stars or collapsing giant stars, and what do messengers like gravitational waves, light, gamma-rays, X-rays, neutrinos, cosmic-rays, and stardust tell us about it? 
  • How were the chemical elements that make up our world formed throughout the history of the universe, and how does the universe continue to create new elements?

There is now an extraordinary opportunity to address these questions:

Advances in nuclear science have led to the startup of a new generation of large-scale accelerator facilities to produce the unstable radioactive isotopes that shape stellar explosions and heavy element synthesis, such as the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) in the US, conceived and planned for more than three decades. Smaller scale accelerator facilities have advanced to enable probing the extremely slow nuclear reactions that drive stars towards the ignition of explosions – either by upgrading the intensities of beams or by reducing cosmic ray background and installing accelerators deep underground. 

In astronomy, a new era has been ushered in with the first detection of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars directly probing nuclear physics in space by LIGO, with the launch of JWST capable of detecting signatures of atomic nuclei at ever greater distances corresponding to the earliest times of the history of the universe, and by the establishment and ongoing development of a broad range of ground based telescopes that monitor large parts of the sky continuously and with unprecedented reach revealing the dynamic nature of the cosmos, in many cases driven by nuclear reactions. 

In nuclear and astrophysics theory, advances in computational techniques, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have led to a quantum leap in capabilities to model stars, stellar explosions, and atomic nuclei enabling the connection between nuclear data and astronomical observations. 

None of these disciplines alone can address the many open questions. Nuclear physics experiments enabled by the latest accelerator capabilities in isolation cannot address astrophysical questions. Astronomical observations alone, will not enable the extraction of quantitative physics from data obtained by the latest telescopes. CeNAM creates the connections, collaborations, and collaborations between collaborations across all these subfields, and across the varied types of research within a subfield, that are needed to take advantage of each of these developments to advance the common scientific goals. 

Scientific Resources