First Science with FRIB

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) has recently begun operations, opening

the door to a new era for nuclear structure and astrophysics studies with exotic

heavy ion beams. As the power of the new facility ramps up over the next several

years, FRIB will enable experimental access to thousands of nuclei far from

stability, providing a wealth of data to inform the best theoretical descriptions of

nuclei, their reactions and how elements are synthesized.

I will provide a brief overview of FRIB, and then focus on the first FRIB

experiment, which was performed in May 2022. Making use of the unique beams

of FRIB and the cutting-edge experimental equipment, new half-lives for exotic

isotopes approaching the neutron drip line in the vicinity of N=28 for the Mg, Al,

Si and P chains were measured with the FRIB Decay Station initiator (FDSi). These

first experimental results are compared to the latest quasi-particle random phase

approximation (QRPA) and shell model (SM) calculations.