Liverpool student wins poster prize at the 2022 IOP nuclear physics conference
Betool Alayed, a Liverpool PhD student of Robert Page, has won the “best poster” prize at the recent IOP Nuclear Physics Conference, held at the University of Surrey in April.
The title of the poster was “Evidence for the decay of a microsecond seniority isomer in 155Hf”
Work was undertaken at Jyväskylä, Finland. Seniority isomers are nuclear states with an electromagnetic decay that is hindered by selection rules related to the seniority quantum number, which counts the number of unpaired particles in a nucleus. The 155Hf nuclei were produced by bombarding isotopically enriched102Pd targets with beams of 58Ni ions, separated in flight using Mass Analysing Recoil Apparatus (MARA) and implanted into the DSSD at its focal plane, which was surrounded by Clover Ge detector and Broad Energy Germanium Detectors to measure delayed gamma rays. A half-life of 0.54(4) µs was determined from a least squares fit to the combined data extracted from the decay curves of γ -ray transitions. A spin-parity assignment of 27/2− for the isomeric state was suggested from the configuration [πh11/2 ⊗ νf7/2 ] seniority= 3, which is consistent with isomeric states identified in the N = 83 isotones.
Congratulations!