Events

Tue October 15, 2019 4:00 pm

Luis Orozco: Eighty Years of Francium

Location:MIT 4-270
Luis Orozco, University of Maryland
Ten Minute Talk:"Direct Observation of Ultracold Bimolecular Reactions" by Yu Liu

Francium, discovered eighty years ago by Marguerite Perey, is the heaviest alkaline atom. She succeeded in a search that started almost 150 years ago with the prediction shortly after the Periodic Table of Elements by Mendeleev of another alkali atom, the ekacaesium. Its isotope of longest half-life lasts only 20 minutes. The pioneer work at CERN by the team led by Sylvain Lieberman found the basic lines of its atomic spectroscopy. Starting in the mid nineties, the trapping and laser cooling of francium in line with an accelerator has made it available for precision spectroscopy. Its atomic and nuclear structure makes it an ideal laboratory to study weak interaction. This talk is part history to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its discovery with the International Year of the Periodic Table and part physics as I will present our proposal, preliminary measurements, and recent progress towards weak interaction studies at TRIUMF, the Canadian National Accelerator in Vancouver, Canada.

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