The FRIB Decay Station: New Horizons with Rare Isotopes

In May 2022, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), located on the campus of Michigan State University (MSU), began delivering exotic isotopes to an international community of scientists. New discoveries are now being reported from radioactive decay of neutron-rich nuclei near N = 20 and N = 28.FRIB is expected to produce roughly 80% of the unstable or radioactive isotopes predicted to exist up to uranium (Z = 92). The new user facility is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, and it is operated by MSU. A high-power superconducting linear accelerator, shaped like a paper-clip, drives the production of these rare isotopes by colliding stable nuclei moving at half the speed of light with a rotating, water-cooled graphite tar-get. These collisions cause the primary stable beam to fragment into a wide variety of unstable nuclei, which can be subsequently filtered through a multistage magnetic separator, the Advanced Rare Isotope Separator, and transported to one of several experimental stations. The FRIB Decay Station initiator (FDSi) (see Figure 1) was developed to enable comprehensive radio-active decay studies of the exotic nuclei produced by FRIB and it was used in the first two experiments in 2022. Further, the FDSi is a highly reconfigurable multidetector system with two focal planes (FP1 for discrete spectroscopy and FP2 for total absorption spectroscopy) that can be optimized for the specific science goals of each experiment. It is designed, built, and operated by a community of users with the sup-port of U.S. funding agencies, including the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.