Research

My research interests focus on the study of nuclear resonance states and what can be learned from their spectroscopy about statistical properties of nuclei. Most of my experimental work is performed at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Lab (TUNL) located at Duke University. There we have a small Van de Graaff accelerator dedicated to high-resolution proton beams (the High Resolution Lab) as well as a program using polarized beams on the FN Tandem accelerator. In particular, we have experiments and/or analyses in progress or in planning to study the following questions:

1. How does isospin-breaking manifest itself in the statistical properties of ³⁰P? What do these statistical properties tell us about chaos in ³⁰P, and how do these results compare to results from our previous analysis of ²⁶Al? We have just completed a long series of measurements of the ²⁹Si(p,g) reaction to address these issues.
2. What is the average strength of the parity-violating matrix element in A~30 nuclei? We are developing methods to measure the longitudinal asymmetry in the ³¹P(p,a) reaction to determine this matrix element and compare it to results obtained for heavier mass nuclides by studying neutron resonances.
3. What information about symmetry-breaking is available by studying statistical distributions of reduced transition probabilities? We are currently re-examing this question for data from ²⁶Al and also for our new data from ³⁰P. Shell-model calculations are also being used to study this issue.
4. Do level densities of nuclei depend on parity? This is an assumption that has been used in numerous models over the years, but the experimental data available to answer the question is rather limited. We are in the planning stage for experiments to study this question for masses A~50.

Copies of Recent Publications

Complete Vita (PDF)

jshriner@tntech.edu