Abigail Bickley likes to blow up atomic nuclei and count the various pieces. Dr. Bickley is a nuclear chemist who does experimental nuclear science using the facilities at MSU’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). She and her fellow researchers use the computers at the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) to perform simulations that inform their experimentation.
Dr. Bickley joined NSCL in 2007. She says the computing power that the HPCC provides is essential to her research. She and her graduate students use the HPCC’s “Brody” cluster. “We really looked forward to the holiday season and other breaks when the queues are empty and we can get a lot of computing done,” she says. She smiles with satisfaction telling how her students ran 2000 jobs in one week.
Those jobs simulate the collision of heavy nuclei. “One way to visualize the types of collisions we study is to imagine a collision between a speeding and a parked car. We know that the collision will result in the breakup of the cars into various pieces, but precisely how the cars break allows us to understand how they were held together in the first place. At the HPCC we simulate a sufficient number of collision events to cover all probable outcomes of the system. These simulations help determine what experiments to perform,” she says. Dr. Bickley explains that her research team uses three different simulation programs that model the nuclear force and the interaction of the nuclei, and often the three programs produce conflicting results. What do they do when the results don’t match? “We run an experiment, of course!”
The researchers use NSCL’s heavy ion beams to collide with target nuclei and look at the products that are created. “In particular what we’re looking at in our research group are neutron-rich nuclei” she says. This is of current interest in nuclear science “because the majority of known isotopes have more neutrons than protrons.” They study neutron-rich nuclei because they can learn about the properties of the nucleus and the forces that hold it together.
After running an experiment, Dr. Bickley’s team uses computers at NSCL to crunch the data gathered. She explains that the amount of data produced is relatively small and does not demand the HPCC for analysis.
Dr. Bickley and her colleagues have recently submitted a proposal for a grant to build a detector that will support her particular experimental needs. When asked if she herself will pick up a soldering gun, she laughs and says “You bet I will!”
The beams available at NSCL are, in Dr. Bickley’s words, “world-unique.” Dr. Bickley explains that the people who do research at NSCL – MSU professors, graduate students, and visiting researchers – create an environment with great expertise in nuclear science. Approximately 10% of all nuclear science graduate students in the United States work with leading faculty in the field using the NSCL.
NSCL provides a unique platform for experimentation. The people at MSU and elsewhere who use the facility constitute a unique community of scientists. In turn, the computers of the HPCC offer many of these scientists the computational capacity essential to the complex calculations their research demands.
Dr. Bickley received her B.A. in Chemistry at Dartmouth College and her PhD in Nuclear Chemistry from the University of Maryland. Her research has led to presentations at national and international conferences, and publications in leading peer-reviewed journals.
