Abstract
High-precision mass measurements of neutron-rich heavy nuclei near the N = 126 shell closure are a frontier of experimental nuclear physics: these masses anchor nuclear-structure models and r-process nucleosynthesis calculations, yet direct measurements in this region remain absent owing to extremely low production rates. The newly commissioned High-Intensity Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF), delivering the world's most intense heavy-ion beams, opens the possibility of producing such exotic nuclei with meaningful statistics via multi-nucleon transfer (MNT) reactions. At the HIAF low-energy experimental terminal, we will perform precision mass measurements using a multi-reflection time-of-flight mass spectrograph (MRTOF-MS) — a technique particularly suited to this task, as it achieves high mass resolving power within a millisecond-scale measurement cycle and requires far fewer ions than many conventional methods. In this seminar, I will introduce the physics of nuclear masses and the N = 126 region, describe the working principles of the MRTOF-MS, and present the latest progress of our work at HIAF — including offline tests of the newly constructed spectrograph reaching a mass resolving power of 5 × 10⁵ — together with the research plan for my PhD thesis.
Anyone interested is welcome to attend.