Scientist’s beams build path to new breakthroughs
AS PART of her PhD at UWC, Dr Ntombizonke Kheswa developed new beams of exotic nickel isotopes – and now that these beams are being accelerated at iThemba LABS, new science breakthroughs are one step closer for South African physicists.
Kheswa’s groundbreaking work will allow for the investigation of physics and astrophysics including estimating the oldest objects in the universe.
“These charged particle beams are initially prepared in a dedicated ion source before they can be accelerated to the target material,” said Kheswa, who works at iThemba LABS, the largest nuclear science facility in Africa.
“These new beams are directed at targets such as nuclei, which are just a few micrometres in size, for analysis.”
In October last year her work bore fruit for the first time, when beams of 60Ni8+ and 62Ni8+ were produced and accelerated at iThemba LABS. Together with the GAMKA array – a nuclear spectrometer – these new beams developed from Kheswa’s research will allow the investigation of fundamental nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics. “Good things in life don’t just come from talent or hard work. They also require patience and team effort – and this study involved the collaboration and support of a variety of people, interactions, contributions and discussions with the ion source specialists from iThemba LABS (Rainer Thomae and Joele Mira, among others), and the organometallic specialists from UWC’s chemistry department (Salam Titinchi and Hanna Abbo), and nuclear physics scientists from both UWC’s physics department and iThemba LABS’ subatomic physics – none of this would have been possible without them,” Kheswa said.
The project was nearly a decade in the making, explained Professor Nico Orce from UWC’s department of physics and astronomy.
“The experiment explores the rise of surface vibrations in nuclei and was first proposed in September 2011.
“But it just couldn’t be done in South Africa at the time. The beams were not here; they were limited – and we needed to develop the technology to produce new science.
“We needed a dedicated PhD student capable of working on both the physics and the chemistry – someone, with the patience and ability to do the job. We needed Ntombi.”