Shotter to lead Canada’s TRIUMF

Alan Shotter, an experimental nuclear physicist at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, will begin a five-year term this September as the director of TRIUMF, Canada’s laboratory for particle and nuclear physics in Vancouver. He succeeds Alan Astbury, who is returning to particle physics research as a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria.

Last year the lab, which is federally funded and run by a consortium of five universities, won a budget increase of 20% to Can$200 million (US$129 million) over the next five years. Indeed, the lab’s outlook is much better today than when Astbury took the reins in 1994. At that time, the Canadian economy was shaky and plans for a $700 million particle accelerator at TRIUMF had been abandoned in the wake of the US cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider. “TRIUMF came very close to being decommissioned,” says Astbury.

TRIUMF survived by diversifying: In addition to core programs using its cyclotron and smaller facilities, the lab now provides components for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, facilitates Canadian research at foreign laboratories, and has built the Isotope Separator Accelerator (ISAC), a linear accelerator that produces intense beams of short-lived exotic nuclei.

ISAC, along with the growing number of radioactive beam facilities worldwide (see Physics Today, May 1997, page 17 ), is opening up the study of unstable nuclei in nuclear astrophysics. “What’s important in this area is to understand the energy involved in cataclysmic events like supernovae,” says Shotter. “We have to know how unstable nuclei react with things like hydrogen and helium.”

Applications for radioactive beams may also be found in nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, engineering, and biological research, says Shotter. “There is a lot of exciting potential here, but until we actually have intense beams of radioactive nuclei, this potential will remain speculative.”