Ani Aprahamian

Research Interests

…“we are all made of star stuff” is a quote from Carl Sagan to reflect the fact that each constituent atom of our bodies has been processed through many generations of stars, numerous supernova explosions, and/or thermonuclear reactions in binary star systems or the interiors of massive stars before they were ejected into space and eventually condensed to form us in our solar system. Nuclear reactions are the main engines that drive these processes. Nuclear decay lifetimes set the timescales for the explosions, nuclear reactions determine how brightly a star glows, and the available nuclear fuel along with the weak interaction can determine how long our sun will last.

My research focuses on the evolution of nuclear structure and the impact of various structure effects on stellar and explosive astrophysical processes.

In nuclear structure, the onset of deformation and the viability of collective excited motion is a point of focus for my work. The effects of nuclear structure in nuclear masses, nuclear shapes, decay lifetimes, and probabilities are explored in terms of how they influence heavy element nucleosynthesis and the elemental abundances for the rapid neutron capture process. This research is a part of the NSF physics frontier center JINA-CEE (Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics - Center for the Evolution of the Elements). Experiments are carried out at the Nuclear Science Laboratory at Notre Dame as well as a number of facilities worldwide, including CARIBU at ANL, the NSCL at MSU, at Jyvakyla in Finland, at Triumf in Canada, and RIKEN in Japan.

Selected Publications

• Dede, S.; Essenmacher, S. D.; Gastis, P.; Manukyan, K. V.; Kuvin, S. A.; Lee, H. Y.; Roach, J. M.; Burns, P. C. and Aprahamian, A. "Electrospraying Deposition and Characterization of Potassium Chloride Targets for Nuclear Science Measurements" 2023 Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research Section A-Accelerators Spectrometers Detectors and Associated Equipment, 1055, 168472. DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2023.168472.
• Roach, J. M.; Manukyan, K. V.; Dede, S.; Burns, P. C. and Aprahamian, A. "Combustion Synthesis of Eu₂O₃ Nanomaterials with Tunable Phase Composition and Morphology" 2023 Journal of Solid State Chemistry, 326, 124235. DOI: 10.1016/j.jssc.2023.124235.
• Lee, K.; Dulal, C.; Tan, W. P.; Gyurjinyan, A.; Sauer, E.; Lesher, S. and Aprahamian, A. "Transformation of ICEBall to fIREBall for Conversion Electron Spectroscopy" 2023 Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research Section A-Accelerators Spectrometers Detectors and Associated Equipment, 1052, 168288. DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2023.168288.
• Dede, S.; Manukyan, K. V.; Roach, J. M.; Robertson, D.; Burns, P. C. and Aprahamian, A. "Irradiation-Enhanced Interactions at UO₂/Al₂O₃/Al Interfaces" 2023 Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 127 (20), pp.9850-9857. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.3c01155.
• Frentz, B.; Aprahamian, A.; Boeltzig, A.; Borgwardt, T.; Clark, A. M.; deBoer, R. J.; Gilardy, G.; Goerres, J.; Hanhardt, M.; Henderson, S. L.; Howard, K. B.; Kadlecek, T.; Liu, Q.; Macon, K. T.; Moylan, S.; Reingold, C. S.; Robertson, D.; Seymour, C.; Strauss, S. Y.; Strieder, F.; Vande Kolk, B. and Wiescher, M. "Investigation of the ¹⁴N(ρ, γ)¹⁵O Reaction and its Impact on the CNO Cycle" 2022 Physical Review C, 106 (64), 065803. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.106.065803.
• Majumdar, A.; Manukyan, K. V.; Tan, W. P.; Dede, S.; Roach, J. M.; Couture, A.; Burns, P. C. and Aprahamian, A. "Neutron Capture of UO₂ Targets Prepared by Spin-Coating Assisted Combustion Synthesis" 2023 Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research Section A-Accelerators Spectrometers Detectors and Associated Equipment, 1045, 167551. DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2022.167551.