Dr. Cornelius Beausang

Associate Professor of Physics
Robert E. and Lena F. Loving Chair
Chair, Physics
D-107 Gottwald Science Center
Office: (804) 289-8783
Fax: (804) 484-1542

The atomic nucleus lies at the heart of matter and at the core of stars. Making up 99.9% of the known mass of the universe the nucleus is a unique strongly-interacting quantum-mechanical mesoscopic system. Consisting of between a few and a few hundred strongly-interacting fermions (the protons and neutrons) the atomic nucleus exhibits a wealth of excited states. Some of these are based on collective excitations, involving the coherent motion of many / all of the constituent particles & rotations and vibrations are good examples of these types of excitations. Other excitations involve the promotion of one or a few nucleons to higher lying states. These single-particle excitations are analogous to the promotion of electrons to higher lying atomic states. One of the goals of my research is to strive to understand the interplay between these two related but different type of phenomena. Experiments are carried out at national and international user facilities such as the Wright Nuclear Structure laboratory at Yale University, the ATLAS accelerator at Argonne National Laboratory, the 88-Inch accelerator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Cyclotron Facility at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Undergraduate students are invited and welcome to participate in these experiments and in the subsequent data analysis.

In addition to off-site experiments I have recently opened a new environmental radiation laboratory at the University of Richmond. Here using (at the moment) two sensitive germanium detectors very low levels of naturally (or otherwise) occurring radioactive materials can be detected in a variety of samples. Possible projects involve measuring background activity levels in car air filters (as part of a national project funded by the Department of Homeland Security) or in various soil or rock samples.

Research:
Low-energy nuclear structure physics
Gamma-ray spectroscopy
Stockpile Stewardship
Environmental Radiation