“The undergraduates come running.” So says Ruth Howes about student participation in the Modular Neutron Array, or MoNA, a detector built in large part by undergraduate physics majors. Howes, chair of the physics department at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, says it is unusual and significant that students can work on MoNA without leaving their home institutions. The detector was installed last summer at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
With MoNA, says MSU’s Michael Thoennessen, the project’s leader, “we can address one of the most interesting questions in heavy ion physics: For a given proton number, what’s the heaviest isotope you can make?” For oxygen, this limit—called the dripline for isotopes that persist for milliseconds—is 24O; with one more neutron, 25O lives only 10−21 seconds. An experiment planned for MoNA, Thoennessen adds, “is to take a beam of...
