• Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars

November 17, 2026 2:00 PM
PAIS 3205

Host:

Dinesh Loomba

Presenter:

Marco Cortesi (FRIB)

Since its invention in the 1970s, the Time-Projection Chamber (TPC) has become one of the most versatile detectors in physics, providing full three-dimensional reconstruction of charged-particle tracks. Operated in active-target mode, where the gas serves as both target and detection medium, TPCs combine high luminosity, large acceptance and the detection of very low-energy recoils, which makes them a powerful tool for studying nuclear reactions with rare isotope beams. After an introduction to the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), this seminar will review the principles of active-target TPCs and their science program at FRIB, together with the novel gaseous amplification and readout technologies developed for reaction studies with exotic nuclei. It will then briefly discuss emerging TPC techniques, such as optical readout and negative-ion drift, and how they could extend these detector concepts to rare-event searches beyond nuclear physics: directional dark matter detection, the neutron lifetime puzzle and possible dark decay channels, the X17 boson and the Migdal effect. The talk will close with a summary and an outlook on future developments.

This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, and used resources of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) Operations, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under Award Number DE-SC0023633.