The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command and Florida State University are partnering to strengthen STEM education and research and build a robust pipeline of future scientists and engineers for the nation.

The two organizations have formalized their collaboration through an Educational Partnership Agreement, which establishes a framework for DEVCOM and FSU to engage on educational outreach initiatives.

The DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Army’s sole fundamental research organization, will execute the agreement.

Through this partnership, FSU students and faculty will have opportunities to tap into the expertise of DEVCOM ARL scientists, gaining exposure to a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines that support the Army’s mission while enhancing their education.

“We cannot predict exactly what the battlefield of the future will look like, but we do know that the nation with the sharpest scientific minds will have the decisive advantage,” said Brig. Gen. Robert Born, DEVCOM Commanding General.

“This partnership with Florida State University is about staying ahead. We are giving these brilliant students the chance to work on real-world national security challenges today, so they can lead the discoveries of tomorrow,” he said.

The agreement will allow FSU students and faculty with unique opportunities to engage in hands-on, real-world research alongside Army scientists; access to state-of-the-art laboratory equipment; and mentorship on career growth and pathways in Army science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

Initial efforts will include lectures, seminars and colloquia, as well as immersive research experiences in nuclear physics. These initiatives will leverage FSU’s John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory.

Army researchers will assist in guiding and mentoring FSU students’ research experiences, aiming to advance scientific knowledge relevant to national security and the U.S. defense industrial base.

“This partnership represents an exciting opportunity for FSU to advance STEM education and research,” said FSU Vice President for Research Stacey S. Patterson. “By joining forces, we are not only enhancing learning experiences for our students but also helping to build a strong pipeline of talented scientists and engineers who will drive innovation and serve our nation’s needs in the years ahead.”

ARL scientists will work side by side with FSU faculty and students to design, conduct and analyze experiments, ensuring that educational outreach outcomes address both academic and Army priorities.

The partnership will also enable Army scientists to mentor and co-advise FSU graduate students, offering guidance on dissertation and thesis research in real-world laboratory settings.

Additionally, the agreement encourages the development of new STEM courses, seminars and experiential learning opportunities for students at all levels, broadening access to hands-on learning and technical expertise.

“What makes this collaboration unique is that it brings real-world defense challenges directly to FSU,” explained Dr. Eric Moore, DEVCOM deputy to the commanding general. “Having DEVCOM scientists work side-by-side with students in their own university labs bridges the gap between academic theory and national security application. Whether these students ultimately join us as civil servants or innovate in the private sector, they will already have the mission-focused mindset our nation needs.”

About DEVCOM ARL

DEVCOM ARL is the Army’s sole fundamental research laboratory serving as the nexus of science between the military, academia and industry. Operating under U.S. Army Futures and Concepts Command and the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command, ARL executes globally recognized research to accelerate delivery of war-winning, disruptive technologies for tomorrow’s Army.

For information, visit the Army Research Laboratory website.

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In the air people breathe, the water on the Earth, the stars in the sky and more, atoms are the building blocks that make up the universe. Understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus is crucial for research with implications for astrophysics and in applications such as medical imaging and data storage.

A new study conducted by Department of Physics researchers using the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory at Florida State University examined titanium-50 nuclei and showed that a long‑standing explanation for where magnetism in atomic nuclei comes from does not fully work for titanium‑50. The research, which was published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that scientists may need to rethink how they explain nuclear magnetism.

“What current models propose is that magnetic strength is largely generated by spin-flip excitations, that means when flipping proton or neutron spins from up to down between so-called spin-orbit partner orbitals,” said Associate Professor Mark Spieker, a co-author on the multi-institution study. “For the first time, we showed that this type of spin-flip cannot be the only mechanism that generates nuclear magnetism.”

How it works

Current nuclear models treat protons and neutrons as individual particles that can occupy fixed energy levels. A spin-flip occurs when these particles change the orientation of their spin as they jump between levels, generating magnetic strength in the process. For many years, scientists believed that this spin-flip mechanism was mainly responsible for magnetic strengths, or signals, in atomic nuclei. Advanced computer modeling also predicted this behavior.

The FSU experiments showed something unexpected: nuclear excited states that clearly showed this neutron spin-flip structure were not the ones producing the strongest magnetic signals. In other words, having more of this neutron “spin‑flip” structure did not automatically mean a stronger magnetic effect.

What they did

The researchers conducted a neutron-transfer experiment at the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory, using the facility’s Tandem Van de Graaff Accelerator to direct a deuteron — a nucleus made of a proton and a neutron — beam at a thin foil of titanium-49. During the reaction, the neutron from the beam was transferred to titanium-49, producing titanium-50 and leaving a residual proton.

Scientists used the Super-Enge Split-Pole Spectrograph at the Fox Lab to measure the different angles at which the proton was emitted in the reaction, allowing them to analyze how the neutron was transferred to titanium-49.

“You could say that the deuteron beam hits the titanium-49, transfers a neutron, and in this process kicks it up a set of stairs. Depending on the nucleus, that set of stairs looks very different,” Spieker said. “With the spectrograph, we can measure how high the different steps are. How high we get up the set of stairs depends on the excitation energy that we give to the nucleus.”

They combined their results with previously published electron- and proton-scattering data and with data from new photon-scattering experiments conducted at collaborating universities. By combining all these approaches, they were able to closely examine how neutrons flip their spin and how much those flips contribute to the nucleus’s overall magnetic behavior.

The researchers saw that the magnetic signal observed in their experiments was not of the same strength as models predicted — a sign that something else must be contributing to the magnetic signals they measured for titanium-50.

“Without combining all these data sets, the story cannot be stitched together cleanly,” said Bryan Kelly, a graduate student at FSU and study co-author. “Seeing the other magnetic excitations, that the other probes are sensitive to, allowed us to conclude that the spin-flip mechanism between spin-orbit partners is not the sole factor of magnetic strength generation.”

Why it matters and future directions

The study’s results challenge long-standing assumptions about the magnetic behavior of nuclei. Improving scientific understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei will refine current models used across nuclear physics and astrophysics and will help to link these with models used in high-energy physics. Such combined efforts between different fields of physics lead to a better understanding of the building blocks of ordinary matter that shape our universe.

“Developing a better understanding of the universe is exciting and fascinating on its own, and as we learn more, we can possibly apply these new insights to all sorts of new ideas,” Spieker said. “All ordinary matter is made of atomic nuclei, so the more we understand these ‘building blocks’ of nature, the more possibilities we have for what we can use them for to benefit society and drive progress.”

In future studies, the researchers plan to examine what accounts for the unexplained magnetism in titanium-50.

“This research showed that we cannot rely on magnetic strength measurements alone to understand excited states of nuclei,” Kelly said. “Magnetic strength is spread out across several nuclear states and understanding why will require further investigations of the nucleus.”

Acknowledgements

Researchers from Florida State University, the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory in North Carolina at Duke University contributed to this study.

This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the German Research Foundation, the Institute of Atomic Physics in Romania, the Romanian Ministry of Research and the Romanian Government.

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Trillions of miles away from our planet, nuclear reactions inside exploding stars produce most of the naturally occurring elements in the universe.

Here on Earth, Florida State University physicists at the John D. Fox Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory will replicate those reactions to better understand how they work and produce elements. Their work to investigate the universe’s building blocks is funded by a $9 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The most distant star explosions are investigated by astronomers through multiple “messengers,” things like visible light, high-energy particles and gravitational waves. Various areas of physics are required to understand these observations from a distance, and nuclear physics plays a central role. The FSU researchers can recreate the conditions during star explosions in the laboratory — atom by atom — to better understand astronomical observations and how such explosions create the chemical elements found in nature.

“When we look out into the universe, we see different stars and star explosions with different properties,” said Ingo Wiedenhoever, a professor in the Department of Physics and a co-principal investigator on the project. “Understanding those star explosions requires us to understand the ingredients of those stars. Some of these explosions tell us about space and time itself, how the universe expands and how that expansion accelerates. We are trying to put our understanding of those star explosions on more solid footing and calibrate them to a level where we have quantitative predictions that we can use in astronomical observations.”

The project includes two major research goals: 

• Studying nuclear reactions within stars: By reproducing the nuclear reactions that take place in stellar explosions, FSU physicists can measure the rates at which reactions occur in exploding stars. That information will give researchers a better understanding of the amounts of elements in the universe and contribute to a deeper understanding of star explosions.
• Investigating unstable nuclei: The research team will also measure the behavior of so-called exotic nuclei, which are atoms of any element with the standard number of protons and electrons but different numbers of neutrons, either unusually large or small. They are highly unstable and don’t occur naturally on Earth. Measuring the properties of exotic nuclei can give physicists clues as to the fundamental nature of how nuclei in general are held together.

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The Florida State University low-energy nuclear physics lab has received new funding from the National Science Foundation to improve the investigation of atomic nuclei and to perform experiments studying nuclear-structure phenomena, which influence the reactions in explosive stellar scenarios that form the chemical elements in our universe.

The John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory and its collaborators at Ursinus College and Ohio University will use the $721,072 grant to add nine additional detectors to its current array of cerium bromide gamma-ray detectors, paving the way for more groundbreaking experiments and collaborative physics research with other institutions.

“Light emitted from atomic nuclei, which we call gamma rays, is undetectable by the human eye, so our research requires extremely sensitive equipment,” said Mark-Cristoph Spieker, assistant professor of physics and Fox Lab researcher. “The bigger the detector, the more sensitive it is in identifying higher-energy gamma rays, which is very relevant for nuclear astrophysics. Several national laboratories are also quite interested in using this new instrument, which we call CeBrA for cerium bromide array, alongside our large-acceptance magnetic spectrograph. I expect that this grant will help us make new discoveries and establish new collaborations with laboratories and universities.”

The cerium bromide detectors of CeBrA will be tested and characterized by Ursinus College professor of physics Lew Riley, a two-time FSU nuclear physics alumnus, and his lab of student researchers before coming to FSU. Riley conducted research at the Fox Lab during his master’s and doctoral studies.

This exchange provides a unique opportunity for Ursinus students to work with modern spectroscopy techniques and instruments at their home institution before potentially traveling to use them after their installation at the Fox Lab.

The grant also will support an ongoing summer Research Opportunity for Undergraduate (REU) students that allows students studying at four-year institutions without nuclear science research opportunities, like Ursinus College, to gain experience at the Fox Lab with their research adviser for several weeks. Riley, who earned his master’s from FSU in 1995 and his doctoral degree in 1997, has accompanied undergraduate physics researchers to participate in this REU for the past six years.

“This allows my students to get hands-on experience and be directly involved in all parts of the research process, from the assembly of the instrument to the conclusion of an experiment,” Riley said. “It’s important for them to see what the lab is like, and students develop a lot of transferable skills while doing experimental work and dealing with data analysis in an environment like the Fox Lab.”

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