He has been working mostly with a group that includes Professor Y. Onel along with a number of students, postdocs, and engineers. A discussion of the work of this group, along with a partial list of publications and presentations can be found here .

Part of his work has been the development of the CASTOR detector, a calorimeter with 16-fold azimuthal segmentation and 18-fold longutudinal segmentation, that surrounds the beam line to cover the very forward angles of 0.1 to 0.6 degrees. A discussion of exotic nuclear objects that CASTOR (Centauro And Strange Object Research) is designed to study is given by the poster that was shown at the Quark Matter 2006 Conference in Shanghai. A preprint of the paper that supplies more details is available both as a .ps file and as a .pdf file.

In Feburary, 2007, he gave a talk at the 23rd Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics. The title of the talk was "CMS Calorimetry in the Very Forward Direction." Ths slides from the talk are in a .ppt file The talk was written up for the proceedings and is available either as a .ps file or as a .pdf file. There were only two subjects covered. One was the placement of quartz fibers in the TAS magnetic shield to extend the angular coverage of CMS to within less than 0.1 degree from the beam direction. The rest of the paper considers the detection of magnetic monopoles in the forward CMS detectors, if isolated poles could be produced with the LHC, and points out that it is unlikely that a pole-antipole pair could be separated to produce an isolated pole.

Another part of his research has been the development of detectors that can be used in the ZDC (Zero Degree Calorimeter) and in other applications such as the International Linear Collider and the upgrade to CMS that will allow a ten-fold increase in luminosity.

Click here for a Powerpoint presentation on the use of PPACs in the ZDC. This was given through the computer (by VRVS) at the Luminosity workshop, Nov. 5, 2004 at CERN.

We have proposed the use of PPACs (Parallel Plate Avalanche Counters) as detectors for sampling the showers produced by high-energy (~1 TeV) hadrons in a heavy metal absorber. For the power point slides of a talk on this subject at the American Physical Society meeting in Tuscon, AZ, on Nov. 1, 2003 Click here.
For the Powerpoint slides of a talk "A New Look at the PPAC" at the the 21st Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, Feb. 11, 2005, Click here.

Click here for a Power Point presentation about heavy-ion reactions at forward angles with CMS at the LHC. These 16 slides are for the 19th Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, Feb. 9-14, 2003. For a postscript version of the same talk Click here . For a postscript version of a related talk at the 18th Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics Click here

A second project studies the breakup of gold nuclei by protons, alpha particles and ¹²C with energies of a few GeV per nucleon. These studies provide information about the liquid-gas phase transition in nuclei and its relation to the critical point for nuclear matter. One of many papers about this research is
V.A. Karnauchov, et al., Critical temperature for the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition, Phys. Rev. C 67 (2003) 011601.

The progress on the liquid-gas phase transition studies as of May, 2007, is given in a talk by one of the group at the IV Polish Workshop on Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions in Kracow, Poland. The slides from the talk are available here .

The third project is the analysis of data from intereactions of ⁵⁸Ni and ⁵⁸Fe beams on targets of ⁵⁸Ni and ⁵⁸Fe at beam energies ranging from 5 to 105 MeV/nucleon. This experiment used the forward array that was designed and constructed at the University of Iowa.

In earlier analysis of heavy-ion data, Prof. Norbeck and graduate student LinBo Yang analyzed data from a series of experiments done at the National Super Conducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University. The experiments were done in collaboration with Professor Gary Westfall at Michigan State University and others. The Iowa group helped run the experiments and contributed some of the equipment.

"Odd-Even Z Isospin Anomaly in Heavy-Ion Reactions" is our favorite paper from these studies. It is published in Physical Review C 60 (1999) 041602. This paper shows that nuclear fragments with even atomic number, such as C, O, Ne, and Mg are formed more often than fragments with odd atomic number, such as B, N, F, and Na. Furthermore, this odd-even effect is 10% larger for ⁵⁸Ni + ⁵⁸Ni than for ⁵⁸Fe + ⁵⁸Fe under identical conditions.
Click here to see the report on odd-even effects at RHIC2000, the 16^th Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics at Park City, Utah, March 11-18, 2000.

Our group has participated in a number of other experiments at NSCL.
Phys. Rev. Lett., 84 (2000) 43 is an example.

For an overall index of the experimental elementary particle and nuclear programs at the University of Iowa Click here.

For the home page of the Department of Physics and Astronomy Click here.

Edwin Norbeck <edwin-norbeck@uiowa.edu>