Materials Modelling meets Nuclear Physics
2021/03/12 by K. Albe
As part of the development and improvement of experimental measurement methods, scientists from the Technical University (TU) Darmstadt were able to measure the extremely fast electromagnetic decay of an excited lithium isotope with unprecedented precision.
Atomic nuclei occurring in nature consist of protons and neutrons, which are held together by the so-called strong interaction. A high-precision experiment was carried out on the superconducting Darmstadt electron linear accelerator (S-DALINAC) of the Institute for Nuclear Physics at TU Darmstadt to measure the lifetime of this state of 6Li. The electron beam of the S-DALINAC can generate photons with a million times the energy of visible light, which are necessary to excite 6Li, so that they could determine the service life with an accuracy of two attoseconds, i.e. two trillionths of a second. The success of the measurement depended on the knowledge of how the lithium carbonate material used affects the absorption of photons. DFT calculations of Materials Modelling Division were able to make a decisive contribution here.
