Read the full story on the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams website.
Michigan State University (MSU) and the French research organization, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, or CNRS, have signed an agreement to establish the International Research Laboratory on Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics (IRL NPA) during a ceremony at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at MSU.
CNRS has nearly 80 international research laboratories worldwide, and IRL NPA at FRIB is the first dedicated to nuclear physics and astrophysics.
Leveraging FRIB’s world-unique research capabilities, the IRL NPA will be located at FRIB and dedicated to answering fundamental nuclear physics and astrophysics research questions.
With the establishment of the IRL NPA, MSU joins other universities, including the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Tokyo, hosting an IRL dedicated to advancing our understanding of the infinitely small and infinitely large structures of the universe.
The IRL NPA aligns with CNRS and MSU missions and strengths.
CNRS is an interdisciplinary public research organization under the administrative supervision of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. It creates long-lasting collaborative research structures abroad, bringing together researchers, undergraduate students, post-doctoral researchers, engineers and technicians from both CNRS and international partner institutions.
MSU has been a place of scientific discovery and a worldwide leader in nuclear science and astrophysics for more than half a century. FRIB and its predecessors have enabled discoveries in nuclear science and astrophysics with accelerated beams of atoms for more than 40 years at MSU. Additionally, MSU has been a top-ranked nuclear physics graduate program for 28 years, according to U.S. News and World Report, and awards 10% of nuclear physics doctorate degrees each year.
Reynald Pain, director of the CNRS’s French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, or IN2P3, and MSU Interim President Teresa K. Woodruff, Ph.D., signed a five-year agreement to officially establish the IRL NPA starting Sept. 1, 2023. As part of the agreement, two scientists from France will be permanently located at FRIB.
“This agreement will bring together researchers in France and the U.S. for the benefit of future scientific breakthroughs in nuclear physics and astrophysics,” said Antoine Petit, the CEO of the CNRS. “This is the CNRS’s seventh international laboratory in the United States, it will join the growing family of collaborative international laboratories that provide a flexible framework to help researchers push the boundaries of scientific exploration.”
The new research lab will bring together world-class researchers from France and the United States to stimulate discoveries in fundamental nuclear physics and astrophysics. IRL NPA’s focus is on the researchers’ complementary expertise and the sharing of information and data from current and future experiences in the scientific fields concerned.