Nuclear astrophysics with radioactive ions at FAIR

The nucleosynthesis of elements beyond iron is dominated by neutron captures in the s and r processes. However, 32 stable, proton-rich isotopes cannot be formed during those processes, because they are shielded from the s-process flow and r-process, β-decay chains. These nuclei are attributed to the p and rp process. For all those processes, current research in nuclear astrophysics addresses the need for more precise reaction data involving radioactive isotopes. Depending on the particular reaction, direct or inverse kinematics, forward or time-reversed direction are investigated to determine or at least to constrain the desired reaction cross sections. The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) will offer unique, unprecedented opportunities to investigate many of the important reactions. The high yield of radioactive isotopes, even far away from the valley of stability, allows the investigation of isotopes involved in processes as exotic as the r or rp processes

Combining gamma-ray and particle spectroscopy with SONIC@HORUS

The particle spectrometer SONIC for particle-gamma coincidence measurements was commissioned at the Institute for Nuclear Physics in Cologne, Germany. SONIC consists of up to 12 silicon Delta E-E telescopes with a total solid angle coverage of 9%, and will complement HORUS, a gamma-ray spectrometer with 14 HPGe detectors. The combined setup SONIC@ HORUS is used to investigate the gamma-decay behaviour of low-spin states up to the neutron separation threshold excited by light-ion inelastic scattering and transfer reactions using beams provided by a 10MV FN Tandem accelerator. The particle-gamma coincidence method will be presented using data from a 92Mo(p, p'gamma) experiment. In a 119Sn(d, X) experiment, excellent particle identification has been achieved because of the good energy resolution of the silicon detectors of approximately 20 keV. Due to the non-negligible momentum transfer in the reaction, a Doppler correction of the detected gamma-ray energy has to be performed, using the additional information from measuring the ejectile energy and direction. The high sensitivity of the setup is demonstrated by the results from a 94Mo(p, p'gamma) experiment, where small gamma-decay branching ratios have been deduced. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Mixed-symmetry octupole and hexadecapole excitations in N=52 isotones

In addition to the well-established quadrupole mixed-symmetry states, octupole and hexadecapole excitations with mixed-symmetry character have been recently proposed for the N = 52 isotones 92Zr and 94Mo. We performed two inelastic proton-scattering experiments to study this kind of excitations in the heaviest stable N = 52 isotone 96Ru. From the combined experimental data of both experiments absolute transition strengths were extracted

Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience

In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?\u27 Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With the rise of neuroscience, however, some of the problems of concern to earlier thinkers, such as imitation, have revived because of the discovery of neuronal mechanisms, or through fMRI studies. The article reviews the history and discusses the implications of current work for the reconsideration of traditional social theory concepts. It is suggested that certain kinds of bridging work with neuroscience would enable us to answer many questions in social theory that empirical sociology has failed to answer