The U.S. Department of Energy is investing an additional $527 million into a cutting-edge isotopes research facility at Michigan State University, where scientific breakthroughs are coming ever more frequently.
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, was conceptualized over decades and built over 14 years with $635.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and $94.5 million from the state of Michigan. The facility conducted its first experiments in May 2022. Since then, researchers from around the U.S. and the world have clamored for “beam time,” access to the facility’s 1,600-foot linear accelerator shaped like a giant paper clip.
The device takes stable atoms to half the speed of light, collides them with targets and, in a billionth of a trillionth of 1 second, creates rare isotopes almost never seen on Earth.
“We delivered (FRIB) on schedule and under budget, and we have been a reliable partner to the government,” said Thomas Glasmacher, FRIB laboratory director. The Energy Department’s latest five-year, $529 million award means the federal government “now wants us to reap the benefit of that public investment … so we can give scientists the opportunities to make discoveries that help humankind.”
And that’s happening at a quickening pace, as FRIB increases its technical and scientific capabilities. The Energy Department announced last month that researchers at FRIB had accelerated a high-power beam of uranium ions to a record 10.4 kilowatts of continuous beam power to a target, producing and identifying three new isotopes.
‘Places where no one has been able to study before’
Uranium is the most difficult element to accelerate, but is extremely important to scientific research, Department of Energy officials said. Of the more than 17 highest-priority scientific programs with rare isotope beams identified by the National Academy of Sciences and the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, more than half require a uranium primary beam. Researchers value uranium because it can produce a large variety of isotopes after fragmentation or fission.
Having started operations with just 1 kilowatt of beam power, FRIB researchers over more than two years have carefully worked their way to record-power beams, reaching 22 kilowatts on a selenium beam recently.
“We are already now in uncharted territory,” said Bradley Sherrill, head of FRIB’s Advanced Rare Isotope Separator Department.
“We have already moved into places where no one has been able to study before. We are making new isotopes that have never been observed before now on Earth.”
Those isotopes “are responsible for why we are here at all,” Sherrill said. As stars explode or neutron stars collide, they threw off isotopes that developed into the fundamental elements that make up our planet, and eventually brought life.
“We want to try to understand what’s going on in the cosmos by re-creating pieces of it here on Earth — the very exciting thing is that FRIB is giving us that possibility for the very first time.”
Isotopes: Same element, different nuclear structure
To better understand what MSU’s FRIB does and why, let’s go back to physical science class. You — and everyone and everything around you — are made of atoms. They are the smallest units of matter. They consist of an inner nucleus of positively charged protons; neutrons that have no charge, and surrounded by a cloud of electrons with a negative charge.
The same element can be built in slightly different ways atomically, depending on the number of neutrons in its nucleus. Those different atoms, with different numbers of neutrons but the same chemical properties, are isotopes. For example, carbon occurs naturally in three isotopes: carbon-12, which has six neutrons (plus six protons equals 12; hence the number), carbon-13, which has seven neutrons, and carbon-14, which has eight neutrons.
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Those one or two extra neutrons can make the properties of isotopes quite different from one another. Carbon-12 is stable, meaning it never undergoes radioactive decay. But carbon-14 is unstable and undergoes radioactive decay with a half-life of about 5,730 years, meaning that half of the material will be gone after 5,730 years. This decay means the amount of carbon-14 in an object tells its age, which is why archaeologists and similar science fields use carbon-14 dating.
Many isotopes are very unstable and can exist in that form for only a very short time; others can last billions of years. Gold has 40 known isotopes, and another 20 not yet seen but theorized by scientists to exist. But only one is stable and typically encountered: the naturally occurring gold that makes necklaces, rings and watches.
Many unstable isotopes give off radioactive energy as they decay. And science and industry have figured out how to put that to use. An isotope of the element fluorine, known as Fluorine-18, is frequently used in medical PET scans. Its radioactivity lasts long enough to generate body scans for health professionals, but dissipates within two hours, making it safer to use with patients.
The FRIB moves stable atoms through a gas of electrons, which removes the atom’s electrons, creating a positively charged ion. Those ions are then guided into the linear accelerator, where they are moved through 46 super-cooled cryomodules across a superconducting material, sped ever faster through alternating voltages — eventually up to about half the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second.
As the stream of ions strikes a target, the resulting collisions cause the ions to lose or gain neutrons or protons and become unstable. This causes them to create thousands of rare isotopes, themselves highly unstable — often existing for only the smallest fraction of a second.
“We have an expectation of what we are looking for and what we are going to see, but very often nature is surprising,” Sherrill said. “We see something that we didn’t expect to see.”FRIB’s very first beam experiment, studying the radioactive decay of a very heavy magnesium isotope, showed that it resulted in far more radioactivity than expected, he said.
‘Capabilities unmatched elsewhere in the world’
“That’s not a dangerous thing because we didn’t make very much of it,” Sherrill said. “But it did not match the expectations, and so it’s surprises that guide us toward new understanding.”
Though beam users are often interested in only a couple of particular rare isotopes, their process of revealing them may also cause dozens of other isotopes to emerge. FRIB’s process preserves that data for the potential use of medical and other researchers, further expanding avenues of exploration.
The record-power uranium beam work was done in a collaboration among scientists from the U.S., Japan and South Korea.
“We have capabilities unmatched elsewhere in the world,” Glasmacher said. “We have an external international body called a program advisory committee that looks at applications for facility use time, and we remain more than threefold oversubscribed. So fewer than one-third of the applicants get beam time, and they come from all over the world.”
Congress and the U.S. Energy Department wouldn’t fund an endeavor like FRIB if it competed with private industry, Glasmacher said. Instead, the facility does work no one else is capable of doing, for the benefit of the Pentagon, DOE, private industry and the medical community. Glasmacher noted that FRIB has taken on an ancillary mission of testing computer chips.
“When chips are in cars or planes or satellites, they get hit by cosmic rays from outer space,” he said. “Companies need to figure out how to make these chips last 30 to 50 years, and we can give them that amount of cosmic rays here in a few minutes.”
And though they are tinkering with atoms, there isn’t a risk of an atom bomb-like explosion in East Lansing. An atomic explosion can occur two ways: fusing light things together, like our sun fuses hydrogen to helium; or fissioning heavy things, like uranium, Glasmacher said.
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“But for all of these things, to make an explosion, you need many, many nuclei — you need moles of the stuff,” he said.
A mole is a big number; a 6 with 23 zeroes after it. At the most, the FRIB deals with atoms at 10 to the 13th power per second — still a huge number, but 10 zeroes shy of being anywhere near atomic explosion range.
Similarly, the FRIB activities also don’t pose a potential radioactivity hazard like a nuclear power plant, as there is no ongoing radioactivity, Glasmacher said. When a beam experiment stops, so does any radiation.
Construction of a new, high-rigidity spectrometer is slated to begin next year, Glasmacher said. “That’s an instrument the scientists use to detect and measure the rare isotopes in reactions, to figure out how the elements in the stars form, and what hold atomic nuclei together,” he said. “This instrument has an unprecedented sensitivity and gives us about a factor of 100 in additional scientific reach.”Ultimately, FRIB researchers are attempting to work their way to a facility design capacity of 400 kilowatts of beam power, 20 times the record-breaking levels already achieved. The level of scientific discovery and understanding that could come from that is difficult to imagine now, Sherrill said.
“Scientists have big dreams and we are trying our best to fulfill them,” he said.
Contact Keith Matheny: [email protected].
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