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Published 27 August 2009

She was headlined in the Times Higher Education earlier this year as a lone star who was enjoying a chance to shine. Well, Alison Bruce (pictured below) is sparkling even brighter after news of a £500,000 grant and an important role in a world-leading research project.

The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has announced a major new grant that will mean the UK playing a significant role in designing and building equipment for what will be the world’s leading nuclear physics facility over the next 25 years. The experiment to be carried out will enhance our understanding of the most common form of matter in the universe, atomic nuclei, and also shed light on where and when the chemical elements are made.

The grant is to build instruments as part of a large international collaboration called NuSTAR (Nuclear Structure Astrophysics and Reactions) www.gsi.de/fair/experiments/NUSTAR  which will be part of the research at FAIR (the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) www.gsi.de/fair a billion euro nuclear physics facility to be built at Darmstadt, Germany.

The UK NuSTAR grant of £10 million, of which £500,000 will come to Brighton, goes towards the design and building of detectors to exploit the beams of short-lived radioactive nuclei which will be produced at FAIR. 

Professor Bruce is the deputy leader of the UK collaboration which includes the universities of Birmingham, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Surrey, West of Scotland and York as well as the STFC Daresbury laboratoty.

FAIR will provide a very wide range of beams of radioactive nuclei. It will allow the Brighton and NuSTAR scientists to examine how the properties of atomic nuclei change as we alter the ratio of neutrons and protons and alter their internal energy.

It will provide answers about what possible combinations of neutrons and protons can exist as nuclei. For example, it will help determine what are the heaviest elements that can be created and tell us how many neutrons we can add to a fixed number of protons before the nucleus simply cannot take any more. Although we know now that the heaviest elements are made in violently explosive events in stars, some of which mark the deaths of stars, no one has any idea about the detail such as where this occurs, why and how much energy is released. To do this requires the beams of radioactive nuclei that FAIR will provide.

Although NuSTAR is aimed at answering fundamental questions about the world, it will constitute a vital training ground for the young people needed to help build nuclear power stations, design and man medical facilities for imaging and therapy and devise security measures to thwart terrorist activities. The research will enhance Brighton's capabilities in terms of producing more Ph.D. graduates in the same areas.

The accolade for Alison follows praise in the THE when it reported on 2008 research assessments and on ranking the work of more than 50,000 academics in 159 institutions across 67 subject areas.

Alison was the university's only entrant to the RAE for physics, but some 45 per cent of Brighton's physics research output was judged to be "internationally excellent", and a further 45 per cent was "internationally recognised".

Alison is quoted: "It's very scary being a sole entrant as there's no hiding … but I have a research group with me, so it's not a solo effort."

"The university and school have been very supportive, and within our school we have two other categories that did well - mechanical engineering and, earth systems and environmental sciences."