Research Interests
Andreas Heinz has a wide range of research interests, focused mainly on the production and the structure of heavy nuclei. For these nuclei the macroscopic structure becomes more and more important and is finally responsible for the very existence of these isotopes. Investigating heavy nuclei is rather challenging since already the production of them is very difficult. Only nuclear fusion allows the production of the heaviest known nuclei. With increasing proton number the probability for a fission reaction right after the fusion process - splitting the newly formed heavy nucleus again into two fragments - is increasing dramatically. Hence, a very thorough understanding of fusion and fission is necessary for gaining deeper insight into the production of heavy nuclei.
The Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory with its gas-filled separator SASSYER offer ideal condition for the investigation of nuclei on the proton-rich side between Lead and Uranium. This is a very important test region for even heavier nuclei, since at N=126 isotopes are stabilized by the neutron shell closure they are at the same time rather fissile. This is also a very interesting region for testing the onset of collectivity and increase the amount of data for a comparison with nuclear structure models.
Before coming to Yale Andreas Heinz has worked on fission properties of radioactive nuclei and studied the influence of a strong ground-state shell effects on the survival probability of fissile compound nuclei. He also worked on the determination of fission barrier of exotic nuclei using different experimental approaches. He participated in a number of experiments using gamma spectroscopy to study the structure of No (Z=102) isotopes using the Gammasphere array and the Fragment Mass Analyzer (FMA) at Argonne National Laboratory. Using the FMA alone he worked on a program to search for super-heavy elements at Argonne and performed first experiments on the structure of 257Rf (Z=104) and its decay daughter using isomer spectroscopy. He is also interested in the description of the level density of highly excited compound nuclei, nuclear dissipation and the statistical model.
Andreas Heinz also worked the production of exotic nuclei using relativistic projectile fragmentation, nuclear astrophysics questions, proton emitting nuclei, superdeformation, quantum phase transitions, lifetime measurements of excited nuclear states, mass measurements of unstable nuclei using a penning trap and used accelerator mass spectrometry measurements to answer questions of geophysical and oceanographic interest. He did experiments at GSI, GANIL, ANL and LBNL using mostly different kinds of recoil separators and various experimental setups of gamma and particle detectors.
