Mini-workshop at the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences
The 73rd board meeting of the Nuclear Physics Division (NPD) of the European Physical Society (EPS) was held on 13-14 June 2017 in Villa Lanna in Prague, the representative residence of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Before this meeting, a one-day mini-workshop was organised in the Nuclear Physics Institute (NPI) of CAS. NPI is big research centre in Rez, near Prague. It was founded in 1955 and actually hosts about 300 staff members, 100 scientists and 30 PhD students. It has an annual budget of about 8.5 Million Euro.
The workshop was opened with the welcome by the NPI Director, Peter Lukas, who stressed the scientific mission of the Institute, which covers a broad range from basic science to many applications and interdisciplinary fields.
Then, the vice-Director of NPI, Jan Dobes, highlighted the participation of NPI in international collaborations and the home facilities, as well. NPI provides important contributions to STAR@RHIC, ALICE@CERN, HADES@GSI, CBM@FAIR, KATRIN@KIT. Moreover, NPI manages the Czech contribution (2% of the total budget) to the construction of the advanced neutron source “European Spallation Source” (ESS) presently being built in Lund, Sweden. The major task is to deliver Beamline for European Engineering Research (BEER). Concerning the home NPI facilities, there are 3 main laboratories which are located in the Center of Accelerators and Nuclear Analytical Methods (CANAM) which hosted, in the last 5 years, about 800 users among whom one third came from abroad. The investigations ranged through material science, archeology, nuclear physics, biology and many other areas.
Jan Stursa reported on the 2 cyclotrons at NPI. the U-120M, which was upgraded and is providing about 3000 hours of beam time per year to users, and the new TR-24, which was commissioned in 2015 and will provide a high intensity proton beam of 300 micro-A in the energy range 18-24 MeV. Anna Mackova presented the present status of the 3 MVolt Tandetron which provides several ion beams for material synthesis and characterisation in solid state physics and physical chemistry with the techniques of induced x-rays and gamma-rays emission, and ion-implantation.
Many other activities at NPI were presented and discussed including the study of hot QCD matter, nuclear reactions for astrophysics, neutron activation analysis, neutron diffraction and generation, radionuclides and radiopharmaceutical dosimetry.
The workshop was completed by a visit to many working facilities of NPI. The whole mini-workshop program can be found here.
