Philippe Collon

Associate Professor,
Experimental Nuclear Physics

Research Interests

His research work involves the development of detection techniques using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). AMS has traditionally been used to detect environmental tracers at and below their natural abundance levels ( ¹⁰Be, ¹⁴C, ³⁶Cl,… ). Its main attribute is its power to accelerate and analyze ions of radioactive nuclei with extremely high sensitivity. However many aspects of this powerful technique cannot only be used for research involving radioactive-beam physics, but also used to study nuclear reactions which, under stellar conditions, involve in most cases very low counting rates and high isobaric backgrounds.

Dr. Collon has been developing AMS for noble gas tracers and is presently working on applying this technique to study nuclear reactions of interest in stellar nucleosynthesis. He is also involved in the development of a high intensity, low energy ion source that will be used to measure reaction rates in conditions much closer to those prevailing in stellar environments than previously.

Selected Publications

“⁸¹Kr in the Great Artesian basin, Australia: A new method for dating very old groundwater,” P. Collon et al., Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 182/1, 103-113 (2000).

“Widths of astrophysically Important resonances in ¹⁸Ne,” B. Harss, C.L. Jiang, K.E. Rehm, J.P. Schiffer, J. Caggiano, P. Collon, J.P. Green, D. Henderson, A. Heinz, R.V.F. Janssens, J. Nolen, R.C. Pardo, M. Paul, T. Pennington, R.H. Siemssen, A.A. Sonzogni, J. Uusitalo, I. Wiedenhoever, T.F. Wang, F. Borasi, R.E. Segel, J.C. Blackmon, M. Smith, A. Chen, P. Parker, Phys. Rev. Lett. C65, 035803-1 (2002).

“Development of an AMS method to study oceanic circulation characteristics using cosmogenic ³⁹Ar,” Ph. Collon et al., accepted for publication in Nucl. Instr. and Meth. B.

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