Dr. Longland’s research group and their collaborators at the University of Edinburgh, UK, have recently had their paper on constraining the ²⁵Al+p reaction rate in classical nova explosions. By studying the ²⁵Mg(d,p)²⁶Mg, excited states in the mirror nucleus were populated and neutron spectroscopic factors were extracted. We measured the spectroscopic factor of the key 0⁺ resonance and set a stringent upper limit on the 1⁺ resonance. The result of these findings is a dramatic decrease of the reaction rate below 200 MK.

The paper will be published soon in the European Journal of Physics A.

Drs. Albert Young & Kent Leung along with collaborators from the European Spallation Source (Lund, Sweden), Los Alamos National Lab, and Oak Ridge National Lab have published a paper describing their concept of how to produce a next-generation ultracold neutron source. Such a source can be used to dramatically improve ultracold neutron experiments or allow whole new type of experiments that address questions in nuclear and particle physics, cosmology, astrophysics and condensed matter physics.

The paper was featured as a Editor’s pick in the Journal of Applied Physics (https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5109879). A Scilight article that was published along with it can be found here: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/10.0000359