The European Union has informed the ChETEC-INFRA consortium that based on our request, the project duration of ChETEC-INFRA is extended to 54 months, with a new formal end date 31 October 2025. The total amount of funding does not change.
Also, the Bellotti Ion Beam Facility (Gran Sasso LUNA-MV) has now formally been added to ChETEC-INFRA. Bellotti is the 14th infrastructure providing transnational access through ChETEC-INFRA. We welcome Matthias Junker and the entire Bellotti team to ChETEC-INFRA!
We look forward to serving nuclear astrophysics and its infrastructures and scientists.
Past week the 11th edition of the Nuclear Physics in Astrophysics conference series, in brief NPA-XI, concluded successfully in Dresden, Germany. There was a record number of 191 academic participants (126 PhD scientists, 53 graduate students, and 12 undergraduates from the local university). Participants came from 18 EU+ countries and 10 countries in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. More than a third of the participants were from Germany, and there were six or more scientists each from Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Hungary, Belgium, and Poland. The gender makeup was in line with the statistics of the field overall, with 28% female participants and 36% of the invited talks given by women.
Participants at the NPA-XI Conference in Dresden.
In altogether 33 invited and 48 contributed talks, all of them in the plenum, and 80 poster contributions, participants summarised the state of the art in nuclear astrophysics and related fields. Both the contributions overall and the individual sessions were balanced between experiment, theory, and observation. Most poster presenters used the opportunity to present their work in a one-minute poster pitch in the plenum. Due to the generosity of the European Physical Journal A and the NuPECC committee, altogether four poster prizes with 200-400 € financial award each were selected amongst the many excellent posters.
The Nuclear Astrophysics Masterclasses, developed in ChETEC-INFRA, being presented at the conference.
Topics discussed included the observed and predicted elemental compositions of the earliest stars, neutron capture nucleosynthesis including its outputs and scenarios, the observation and interpretation of multi-messenger events, a proposed new nucleosynthesis process, gravitational waves, and advanced laboratory experiments. The high share of young participants (in addition to 53 PhD students, there were 14 postdocs with less than two years after the PhD and even 12 undergraduates – altogether 41%) is encouraging given the fact that there is still much to study and learn regarding the synthesis of the chemical elements in the cosmos.
Poster Session at the conference.
The conference was co-organised by the Dresden-based institutions HZDR, TU Dresden, and DZA Deutsches Zentrum für Astrophysik, in close partnership with regional partners from the University of Wroclaw, the AIP Leibniz Center for Astrophysics Potsdam, and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Two of the founding fathers of nuclear astrophysics agreed to contribute: Professor Friedel Thielemann from the University of Basel gave a public outreach talk in German for the general public. Professor Roland Diehl from MPE Garching summarised the state and outlook of the field in a dinner speech, given not as originally planned aboard a steamboat on the river but due to flooding simply in a restaurant. Four company exhibitors from fields as diverse as instrumentation, publishing, and accelerator construction contributed to the innovation aspect of NPA-XI.
NPA-XI is part of a series of conferences taking place every two years, under the auspices of the Nuclear Physics Division of the European Physical Society. The conference was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), ChETEC-INFRA, IReNA, and NuPECC.
After a very well-received presentation by Dr. Matthias Junker at the ChETEC-INFRA 4th General Assembly in Strasbourg, France, the Bellotti Ion Beam Facility by INFN is provisionally added as a 14th Transnational Access facility to ChETEC-INFRA.
The Bellotti Ion Beam Facility was inaugurated at the deep-underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory in October 2023. Its 3.5MV Singletron accelerator is designed to provide excellent energy stability and intensive beams of hydrogen, helium, or carbon. Further details can be found here.
The 3.5MV Accelerator at the Bellotti IBF (Credit: LNGS Accelerator Service)
The inclusion of the Bellotti IBF is pending final approval by the European Commission. Prospective users are already now asked to submit proposals for the ChETEC-INFRA collection date on August 17, 2024. These proposals will be evaluated by two boards in parallel: the ChETEC-INFRA User Selection Panel, and the Bellotti Program Advisory Committee. If both committees approve the proposal, and the EU approves the inclusion of Bellotti in ChETEC-INFRA, beam time and travel support will be provided.
On May 27 and 28, the ChETEC-INFRA consortium met in Strasbourg. Hosted by IPHC, the 4th General Assembly brought together consortium members and nuclear astrophysicists from outside the consortium, to discuss developments in nuclear astrophysics and catch up on developments of the Research and Networking activities within ChETEC-INFRA, as well as the Infrastructures in the project.
Opening with an overview of the project, Day 1 of the meeting offered a mix of scientific presentations from project partners and invited nuclear astrophysics researchers, as well as news from the Europlanet 2024 RI Network, and the formal session of the General Assembly. After a long day of presentations and discussions, the University of Strasbourg’s planetarium offered a very fitting environment to continue the scientific exchange on topics of the Universe.
Progress reports of the ChETEC-INFRA Work Packages, and the Transnational Access (TA) User Meeting formed the program of day 2. The TA meeting offered the opportunity to exchange experiences and collect feedback on the TA program between facility representatives, TA users and User Selection Panel members.
About 60 participants joined the hybrid meeting. A detailed program and material of the presentations is available on the meeting web page.
A workshop on the state of the art for 12C(α,γ)16O, 12C+12C fusion, and 22Ne(α,n)25Mg in nuclear astrophysics will be held on May 29, 2024, in Strasbourg.
The fourth ChETEC-INFRA General Assembly will be held in Strasbourg from May 27 to 28, 2024. As for previous Assemblies – online, in Padua and in Debrecen – the program will feature progress reports from within the project, as well as scientific talks in the field of nuclear astrophysics in general.
The Transnational Access program of ChETEC-INFRA supports access to 13 European infrastructures for nuclear astrophysics studies. Facilities include observatories, ion-beam accelerator laboratories, and a high-performance computing cluster.
Access can be provided in different ways. While some facilities mainly offer access in visitor mode (users traveling to the facility to conduct their project with financial support available for their travel), and others focus on service mode access (work on site at the facility performed by local staff in coordination with the users), a number of facilities are available to offer access in ways most suitable for the science case at hand. Facility access is provided free of charge to the user, and awarded based solely on scientific merit of the proposal. Scientists with affiliations from any other country than the country of the facility are eligible to submit proposals.
The next collection date for proposals is February 17, 2024. The following call will be open until May 2024.
General information on Transnational Access, contact information and the link for the weekly open “office hours” on Zoom can be found on this page.
The nuclear NETwork GENerator NetGen is an interactive, web-based tool to help astrophysicists in building up a nuclear reaction network as defined by each user. It generates tables of the necessary nuclear reaction rates on a temperature grid specified by the user, and provides the references of the sources of these rates. All reaction rates, theoretical or experiment-based, include the contribution of thermally populated excited target states through the calculation of the stellar enhancement factor. NetGen includes about 8330 nuclides located between the neutron and proton driplines in the 1 ≤ Z ≤ 110 range.
In the latest version, NetGen include 90 new experimental reaction rates and the possibility to use the ASTRAL database for neutron-capture reactions. alpha-decay, beta-decay and spontaneous fission rates have been updated with Nubase2020 (Kondev et al. 2021). The mass models have been updated to the experimental + recommended masses from the atomic mass evaluation AME’20 (Huang et al. 2021).
Finally, the website has been redesigned and additional functionalities have been added: possibility to plot individual rates, explore all the references available in NetGen for individual rates, interactive reaction choices, and other parameters.
The ChETEC-INFRA community strongly denounces the heinous, terrorist assault that was launched against Israel on October 7, 2023. The scientific community in the field of nuclear astrophysics in Europe expresses its solidarity with the Israeli people, particularly the scientists and their families who have been impacted, and especially to our ChETEC-INFRA partners at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Terror goes against the core values of ChETEC-INFRA and of the scientists in its community. We oppose violence against civilians regardless of nationality and hope that peace in the region can be reestablished. As scientists we believe that political differences should be resolved peacefully.
ChETEC-INFRA’s Transnational Access program offers access to 13 facilities in the field of nuclear astrophysics, spanning from accelerator laboratories for accelerator mass spectrometry (at DREAMS and VERA), accelerator facilities for ion beam experiments (Felsenkeller Accelerator Laboratory, Tandem Accelerator at the University of Cologne, Cyclotron at Atomki, van-de-Graaff accelerator at the University of Frankfurt, Tandetron accelerator at IFIN-HH, and the PTB Ion Accelerator Facility), a high-performance computing cluster (Viper) and optical telescopes (Nordic Optical Telescope, Rozhen National Astronomical Observatory, Perek 2-m Telescope at the Ondřejov observatory, Molėtai Astronomical Observatory).
While some facilities mainly offer access in visitor mode (users traveling to the facility to conduct their research, with financial support available for their travel), and others focus on service mode access (work on site at the facility performed by local staff in coordination with the users), various facilities are available to offer access in ways most suitable for the science case at hand.
As an example we would like to emphasize the case of the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), which apart from regular visitor mode also offers (queue) service mode observing and provides a wide range of options for flexible scheduling through Target-of-Opportunity programs and/or monitoring programs on any time-scale (from hours to years).
The Nordic Optical Telescope. (Credit: public domain / Bob Tubbs)
Transnational Access proposals in ChETEC-INFRA are collected every three months. The current call for proposals is open until November 17, 2023.
Interested in which facility and mode of access may be most suitable for your nuclear astrophysics science case? Please do not hesitate to reach out to the contacts at the individual facilities or to the ChETEC-INFRA TA Management team via e-mail or through the weekly office hours.
