Pioneering instrument designed

 

Scientists and technicians could bring us a step closer to understanding exploding stars and the origins of the elements.

 
The University of York instrument has taken its first data to present at TRIUMF, Canada’s subatomic research facility.
 
Named the TACTIC detector, it is an active gas target time-projection chamber - similar to some of the large detectors used at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) the world’s largest particle physics laboratory near Geneva.
 
But TACTIC is designed specially to study the much lower energy nuclear reactions that occur in supernovae and x-ray bursts, and this means that the detector is substantially smaller than its counterparts at CERN.
 
TACTIC was designed jointly by researchers at the University of York, led by Dr. Alison Laird, and at TRIUMF, led by Dr Lothar Buchmann, with technical support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Daresbury Laboratory.

Many years of work ahead for projector

After assembly and initial testing at York, TACTIC was shipped to TRIUMF in British Columbia, where initial online data visualisation showed the tracks of boron and nitrogen nuclei being scattered through the device.
 
TACTIC allows scientists to follow these atoms one at a time as they interact in the gas, leaving a trail behind them. Studying how such light atoms behave helps them to understand how elements are created in stars.
 
Dr Laird said: “TACTIC surpassed almost all performance expectations and the data collected has proved to be a goldmine of information. It will take us some time to extract all the information it contains. But once this analysis is complete, the performance of TACTIC will be optimised to study specific nuclear astrophysics reactions with radioactive beams at TRIUMF and other laboratories around the world.
 
“The initial tests have proved extremely exciting and the Nuclear Astrophysics group at the University of York and TRIUMF are enthusiastic about the many years of work ahead with this impressive new detector.”
 
 
 

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