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Daniela Leitner Associate Director for Operations ECR Ion Sources and linear accelerators   Ph.D., Physics with Distinction, University of Technology, Vienna (1995) Joined NSCL in October 2010 Phone (517) 908-7455 Fax (517) 353-5967 Office 100B   leitnerd at fribmsuedu

My research interests have centered on the development and implementation of high-intensity Electron Cyclotron Resonance (ECR) ion sources for high charge state heavy-ion beams and recently have expanded to include heavy-ion linear accelerators; specifically the construction of the ReA3 ReAccelerator at NSCL.

Electron Cyclotron Resonance (ECR) ion sources utilize resonantly heated, magnetically confined plasmas to create highly charged ions, similar to fusion plasma devices. In the last three decades, remarkable performance improvements of ECR injector systems have been made mainly due to advances in magnet technology as well as an improved understanding of the ECR ion source plasma physics. As senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, I have led the development of the fully superconducting Versatile ECR ion source for Nuclear Science (VENUS), which is currently the highest performance ECR ion source worldwide. At NSCL, VENUS will be used as the injector for the high power driver LINAC of FRIB and I am looking forward to continuing ECR ion source development for the FRIB facility.

ECR ion sources and ion beams extracted from them are complex. Up to 30 ion species and charge states are extracted at the same time and need to be taken into account when modeling the ion beam transport. Due to the magnetic confinement necessary to sustain the ECR plasma, the ion density distribution across the extraction aperture is inhomogeneous and charge state dependent. The initial ion beam distribution at the extraction aperture is still a subject of research. Developing adequate simulation tools for ion beams extracted from ECR ion source injectors is one of the research goals of my group.
Additionally, I am overseeing the construction of the NSCL’s new reaccelerator called ReA3. Though rare isotopes flying at half the speed of light have many uses, many experiments require these beams to be at lower energies. To do this, the lab is constructing gas stoppers to cool the beam down before bunching and reaccelerating the rare isotopes to energies of 0.3 to 12 MeV/nucleon. This will allow experiments such as low-energy Coulumb excitation and transfer reaction studies and also for the precise study of astrophysical reactions.

Finally, I also am involved in the upcoming Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). This facility will be 4,850 feet underground in what was formally the oldest, largest and deepest mine in the Western Hemisphere in Homestake, South Dakota. One of the experiments proposed to be built at DUSEL is DIANA (Dakota Ion Accelerator for Nuclear Astrophysics), a small accelerator facility which will feature two small low-energy accelerators. One will be a high voltage platform operating between 50 and 400 keV, while the second will be an electrostatic accelerator operating between 350 keV and 3 MeV to measure low energy nucleosynthesis cross sections. Three scientific issues in stellar nucleosynthesis will be addressed by DIANA: (i)solar neutrino sources and the metallicity of the sun; (ii) carbon-based nucleosynthesis; and (iii) neutron sources for the production of trans-Fe elements in stars.