Welcome to FRIB
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU) is a world-class research and training center, hosting the most powerful rare-isotope accelerator. MSU operates FRIB as a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC), with financial support from and furthering the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. FRIB is where researchers come together to make discoveries that change the world. They study the properties and fundamental interactions of rare isotopes and nuclear astrophysics and their impact on medicine, homeland security, and industry.
Research areas
FRIB advances nuclear science by improving our understanding of nuclei and their role in the universe, while also advancing accelerator systems.
Capabilities
In establishing and operating FRIB, capabilities were developed that transfer to other industries and applications.
User facilities
FRIB hosts the world’s most powerful heavy-ion accelerator and enables discoveries in rare isotopes, nuclear astrophysics, fundamental interactions, and societal applications like medicine, security, and industry.
Learn more about upcoming events taking place at FRIB.
Understanding how the same nuclear interactions govern systems ranging from ordinary nuclei to neutron-star matter is central to nuclear astrophysics. These interactions not only determine nuclear stability but also shape the reaction pathways that produce the elements and influence the behavior of extreme stellar environments. Addressing these questions requires ab initio methods that can capture strong correlations, large particle numbers, and sensitivities to the underlying nuclear forces. In this talk, I will present recent advances in neural-network quantum states (NQS) as a scalable variational framework for strongly correlated quantum systems. I will discuss the development of permutation-equivariant neural architectures and Pfaffian pairing ansätze, which enable accurate simulations of large systems of ultracold Fermi gases and electron gases. Extensions of these tools to nuclear matter and medium-mass nuclei provide insight into clustering phenomena and many-body correlations relevant for neutron-star crusts. Complementary work on Bayesian uncertainty quantification connects microscopic theory to both astrophysical and experimental observables. This includes reduced-order models for nucleon-nucleon scattering and Gaussian-process-based strategies for constraining the neutron-star equation of state and propagating uncertainties to derived stellar properties. At the limits of stability, binding becomes delicate and resonances appear, regions that FRIB will explore in unprecedented detail. I will conclude by outlining future directions for extending NQS to describe low-lying excited states and resonances, including approaches based on Grassmannian geometry and complex scaling. Together, these developments aim to build a unified, scalable, and uncertainty-quantified ab initio framework capable of supporting FRIB's mission and advancing our understanding of nuclear structure and astrophysics.
The reaction 22Ne(alpha,neutron)25Mg is one of the main neutron source in stars, providing the neutron flux for the weak component of the s-process in massive stars and partially contributing to the main component in AGB stars. For these reasons, its reaction rate is crucial in nuclear astrophysics.
However, the limited availability of experimental data in the energy range of astrophysical interest still leads to significant uncertainties in the reaction rate and in nucleosynthesis predictions.
The SHADES project addresses this long-standing lack of data in the energy region relevant to stellar He-burning, which spans from the neutron threshold up to a strong resonance at Ecm ≈ 706 keV, which remains the only one accessible on surface.
The main novelty of SHADES is to directly study the 22Ne(𝛼,𝑛)25Mg in the deep underground environment provided by the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (INFN-LNGS), thus exploiting the advantages of a highly reduced-background environment to enhance sensitivity to the weak neutron signals characteristic of this reaction.
In this seminar, I will describe the development and optimization of the SHADES experimental setup, the strategies adopted during the several data-taking phases, and the first results obtained from the exploration of the relevant energy region.
Education & training
FRIB at MSU is a world-class research and training center where students and researchers from all career stages and backgrounds come together to make discoveries that change the world.
External news and journal publications discussing FRIB.
One of the nation's premier research facilities located at Michigan State University is getting a multi-million dollar upgrade. Late last month, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science approved $49.7 million for MSU's Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.
A team of scientists, including researchers from FRIB, published an article in Nature Physics on how research on neutron-rich nuclei shows that in the so-called islands of inversion, they are deformed rather than spherical in their ground states.
Scientists and engineers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) have reached a new milestone in isotope studies. They accelerated a high-power beam of uranium ions and delivered a record 10.4 kilowatts of continuous beam power to a target. The work is published in the journal Physical Review Accelerators and Beams.
