Session PA: The Next Generation of Nuclear Physics: Facilities Today, Next Year, and the Next Decade

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.   

The JLab of the Future: New Opportunities in Hadronic Physics

Jefferson Lab is facing a time of change, unprecedented since the founding of the Lab, by diversifying and expanding its scientific mission, in partnership with DOE-SC. Over the next decade Jefferson Lab will be delivering on the 12 GeV program while laying the groundwork for CEBAF's future role in Nuclear Physics. Upgrades for higher luminosity, polarized and unpolarized positron beams, and higher energies up to 24 GeV are envisioned. In the presentation an overview of this program will be given.   

Indirect searches for BSM at the EIC

The next stage of searches for beyond-the-Standard Model (SM) physics will rely increasingly upon indirect probes of heavy new physics. The appropriate theoretical framework in which to formulate these searches is the SM Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), formed by adding higher-dimensional operators to the SM suppressed by a high energy scale below which heavy new fields are integrated out. Since the deviations induced by many classes of SMEFT operators grow with energy it is often assumed that the strongest probes of these effects will come from the LHC. We show in this talk that the LHC contains blind spots in its coverage of semi-leptonic four-fermion operators. We demonstrate that a future EIC, with the possibility of polarizing both electron and ion beams, will play a crucial role in covering these blind spots and making sure that the full parameter space of beyond-the-SM possibilities is investigated.