DATE2021.12.15 #Awards & Prizes

Dr. Ryo Taniuchi, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of York, U.K., Receives the 38th Inoue Research Encouragement Award

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Mr. Ryo Taniuchi

As a graduate student in the Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Dr. Ryo Taniuchi succeeded in the world's first observation of deexcitation gamma rays in nickel-78, and revealed that nickel-78 is a hard nucleus with double magic properties. His Doctoral dissertation, "In-beam gamma-ray nuclear spectroscopy of ^78Ni," which summarized the results of this research, was the subject of the 38th Inoue Research Encouragement Award. As a key member of an international research collaboration with a total of 71 members, Dr. Taniuchi played an active role in the execution of experiments and data analysis, and his paper, published as the first author in an academic journal, has attracted worldwide attention.

Nickel-78 is a special nucleus in the field of nuclear physics. The reason is that Ni-78 is a nucleus with two magic numbers: 28 protons and 50 neutrons. In studies of stable nuclei, nuclei with two magic numbers are known to be very hard, and researchers around the world have been waiting for an answer to the unsolved question of whether this double magic property is maintained in the neutron-rich nucleus, nickel-78.

The indicator of double-magic properties is the energy of the first excited level of the nucleus. Taniuchi and his colleagues efficiently generated the excited level of nickel-78 using an unstable nuclear beam obtained at the RI Beam Factory, a heavy ion accelerator facility at RIKEN, and observed the de-excited gamma rays with a highly efficient gamma ray detector. Careful analysis of the data obtained by Taniuchi revealed that the energy of the first excited level is much higher than that of the surrounding nuclei, providing direct evidence of double-magic properties.

Currently, Taniuchi is working in the research environment at the University of York in the U.K., where he is challenging the problem of inter-nucleon correlations in nuclei, in addition to further exploration of the structure of the Ni-78 nucleus.

The 38th Inoue Research Encouragement Award
http://www.inoue-zaidan.or.jp/b-01.html?eid=00049

(Responsibility: Professor Hiroki Sakurai, Department of Physics)