The thick walls of Burlington Hall house a rare piece of equipment.
Present at only about 25 universities, the one megawatt nuclear reactor provides hands-on experience for students in nuclear engineering and allows researchers to develop new techniques and discoveries.
But one of those research projects at the program is even more rare than the reactor itself. In fact, it’s the world’s best. In the fall of 2007, scientists and researchers developed the most intense beam of low-energy positrons ever focused.
Ayman Hawari, a professor of nuclear engineering and the director of the nuclear reactor program, runs the positron beam experiment. He said the beam will be used to deduce certain properties of a material.
Hawari said the process would enable “surface and shallow depth examination at the nano scale” — one billionth of a unit — without harming the material.
Though the beam was completed and verified in October 2007, few students know it exists.
“I had no idea people were still doing much with [the reactor],” Julie Murphy, a junior in landscape architecture, said.
Althought it’s not necessarily common knowledge on campus, the positron beam is well recognized in the nuclear science community and Hawari said other facilities are hoping to follow in the footsteps of N.C. State’s program.
“I hear very sketchy stories about attempts at some national labs,” Hawari said with a grin. “I haven’t seen [them] materialize.”
He explained that gamma rays can produce positron-electron pairs when they interact with tungsten.
“Once [the positrons] enter a material, they tend to gravitate to the open spaces in matter,” he said.
The technique, “gives you an idea of porous structure, possibly due to damage.”
Experiments on materials will begin, “hopefully within the next one-year period,” Hawari said.
One student who took a class on reactor operation said he had already taken interest.
“I do want to go see it,” Matthew Hamlett, a graduate student in computer engineering, said.
“It’s really cool that they’ve brought a lot of popularity to N.C. State,” Hamlett said. “Maybe they can bring more students into nuclear engineering.”
