Currently I’ve been looking at the breakdown of isobaric-spin symmetry in the \(A\sim70\) mass region of nuclei. The picture above shows the “Mirror” chart of nuclides, where mirror nuclei (nuclei for which neutron number, \(N\), and proton number, \(Z\), have been swapped) are plotted according to their isobaric-spin, \(T\). For almost the entire mirror chart this symmetry is manifested by the mirror nuclei have similar ground states. My latest research is studying a system where this is not the case (the black squares at \(A=73\) ), and is difficult to predict with standard nuclear theory! Discoveries like this are always welcome, as they invite more experiments and keep me employed.
My Ph.D. was on fundamental nuclear reaction dynamics, a topic that I’m still researching. I have an accepted proposal at the ATLAS facility at Argonne National Laboratory (not the detector array at CERN!) to continue this line of research.
I’m also fascinated with the cosmos, in particular neutron stars where general relativity and physics on the smallest scales start to intersect. I’m really excited to see where the next few decades take us with the observation of graviational waves from binary neutron-star and black hole merger events and the onset of multi-messenger astronomy.