Tour the University’s new nuclear accelerator.
The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Physics will hold an open house for its new nuclear accelerator from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday (Nov. 3) in the Nieuwland Hall of Science. Tours of the accelerator will leave 124 Nieuwland Hall every 15 minutes.
The accelerator will allow researchers to explore the origin of the elements in the chemical evolution of the universe.
The new National Science Foundation-funded 5MV accelerator represents a major equipment upgrade for Notre Dame and is the first accelerator NSF has funded in nearly a quarter of a century.
It is housed inside a new 40-foot-tall tower located above the existing Nuclear Science Laboratory in the center of Nieuwland. The University’s astrophysics program, started in the 1980s, is one of the leading global centers, attracting visiting researchers from 20 to 30 countries each year.
The new accelerator is helping to recreate stellar nuclear processes in the laboratory to complement the observational studies of new earth- and space-based telescopes that trace past and present nucleosynthesis processes in the cosmos.
Originally published by at news.nd.edu on October 30, 2012.