Poster prize at the joined HEPP and Astroparticle Physics meeting 2015
Ruchi Garg, from the University of York, won as the highest ranked Astro-Particle Physics poster the third prize at the poster competition of the joint IoP Particle, Astroparticle, and Nuclear Physics groups Conference, held at the University of Manchester in March, 2015.
The presented project is a Nuclear Astrophysics project, probing the triple-alpha continuum in the Carbon-12 nucleus in search of the second excited 2+ state. This state appears in the cluster model calculations as the first rotational excitation of the famous Hoyle state. Knowledge of this state is required to understand the debated structure of the Carbon-12 nucleus in the Hoyle state. Also, at higher temperatures in stars, the reaction rate of the triple-alpha process has a large dependency on the energy level of this second excited 2+ state.
