February 2025
It has been a busy time for the division since the last newsletter with various research advances, awards, collaboration meetings, and other activities, some of which are featured in this issue of the NSD Newsletter.
The GRETA project has made steady progress and started to demonstrate its Key Performance Parameters (KPP), a major step towards achieving CD4-A approval for early science planned for this spring. You can find more details on the GRETA progress in this issue of the newsletter. In November we welcomed 180 scouts to the Lab for the 12th Annual Nuclear Science Day for Scouts and a number of NSD volunteers supported the event. In December, we held our 2nd annual off-site division retreat with close to 120 participants engaging over two days in broad discussions covering NSD science highlights, our collaboration across the division and across Berkeley Lab, career development strategies, outreach engagement, and culture building activities. Following outcomes from the 2023 division pulse survey and last-year’s lab-wide culture survey the division has also rolled out a Community Agreement to support ourselves and each other in building a stronger community culture in the division. You can find more context on this in this issue.
Since our last Newsletter, there were also a number of other noteworthy developments. We were able to celebrate Raúl Briceño, a faculty scientist in the Nuclear Theory Group who was among the recipients of this year’s Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The Nuclear Data Group in the Low-Energy Program was elevated to a Program within the Division, recognizing its leading role in the national and international nuclear data communities, and the growth of nuclear data initiatives in basic and applied research. An example for this is the recent Physical Review Letter (PRL) by a collaboration of scientists from the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division and NSD’s Nuclear Data Program. The paper reports on the enhancement of isomer population in bromine isotopes when exciting them using ultra-fast electron beams generated via laser-plasma acceleration at ATAP’s BELLA Center.
Other notable publications since the last newsletter include a PRL on the definition of jets in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering at the future Electron Ion Collider; and an Editor’s Suggestion in Physical Review C on nuclear-level effective theory of 𝜇→𝑒 conversion.