As teaching is one of this lab’s main themes It’s the place that introduced me to physics with beams They accelerate nuclei, the protons and neutrons At the centers of atoms, we call ‘em nucleons Protons define the element, its chemistry Neutron numbers affect elements with subtlety They define the isotopes, and with the FRIB they hope To make some that no one’s ever seen before, and that’s dope. So you know the elements from the periodic table But this other version highlights isotopes that are stable The isotopes we know are on a diagonal track And at first glance, I thought that it looked pretty whack But as you get away from that stable nucleus line There’s radioactive isotopes we don’t usually find On earth, because these nuclei prefer to decay Into more stable isotopes by tossing particles away Before they can, the teams here check out their dynamics Measure masses and lifetimes, and study their mechanics
They’re building FRIB with mysteries to solve Like what reactions drive stars and how do they evolve The strong force binds nuclei but we still can’t say Exactly why some are stable while others decay A more powerful machine can push the frontier The physicists here, they get nuclear
So let’s say you were making a new kind of nucleus In F-RIB, a planned facility that’s long been discussed The starting atoms – they’re just ordinary Stable isotopes – they’re easier to store and carry You strip off their electrons for a charged state They zip through electric fields made to accelerate Then you slam them into something, we call it the target, Five percent of your nuclei are going to really hit it Those that do will be different from your starting crew They’ve lost protons and neutrons, or maybe gained a few All kinds of fragments have just been created So you put them through a magnet that can get them separated If it’s got lots of protons, it takes an inside curve But more neutrons tend to drag it for an outside swerve You filter out the isotopes that you don’t want in the stream And voila, you’ve got a rare isotope beam And to put your nucleus on the nuclear map You’ll then measure it in a detector or trap This facility is for research and to teach So the “you” could be more than just a figure of speech.
They’re building the FRIB with mysteries to solve Like what reactions drive stars and how do they evolve The strong force binds nuclei but we still can’t say Exactly why some are stable while others decay A more powerful machine can push the frontier The physicists here, they get nuclear
A branch of nuclear physics works to understand the stars Because burning hydrogen only takes them so far If they’re big they can run through helium, carbon Neon, oxygen and silicon, right up to iron Which is bound so tight that burning reaches its conclusion There’s no energy to gain by either fission or fusion So the core collapses, then BAM it explodes! The nuclei get broken but it’s sending out loads Of nucleons, which ram each other and stick together Protons and neutrons can switch from one to the other Swapping charge is simple when they’ve got the energy To make a small charged particle and set it free So they stagger through the chart, and when the story is told They might be copper or iodine or possibly gold And on a much smaller scale, these nuclei are made In a lab to see how this scenario played Out. The stuff we see on the earth from Peru to Moldova Came out of an explosion – we’re made of supernova (Supernovae…)
Although it’s for basic science, FRIB could hold answers For medicine – specifically the treatment of cancer Isotope therapy shoots nuclei into tumors Killing cancer cells to keep the patient out of the tomb The beam packs the most punch in the place where it halts And since it stops in the tumor, it overcomes