Speaker
Description
The SPES project is being built at the Legnaro National Laboratory of INFN. It is an interdisciplinary project, ranging over nuclear physics, nuclear medicine and materials science. SPES (SPES $\beta$) will provide a Radioactive Ion Beam facility for the study of neutron rich unstable nuclei of interest to nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics research. At the same time ( (SPES $\gamma$), it will host a laboratory for research and production of radioisotopes to be applied in nuclear medicine.
The facility is being built at the Legnaro National Laboratory (LNL) of INFN. The acronym stays for “Selective Production of Exotic Species”. At the heart of the project is a new, high energy (up to 70 MeV) and high intensity (up to 700 $\mu$A) proton cyclotron which is capable of providing two separate beams at the same time. One of these will be used for the Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) facility, the other for the applications.
The physics case for SPES $\beta$ is the study of unstable nuclei, especially on the n-rich side, which are of crucial importance on the star evolution, for which new nuclear shapes, excitation levels and stability configurations are expected.
New instrumentation and upgrading of existing set-ups are foreseen to afford the challenges which will be opened due to the availability of exotic beams with good intensities and purity.
On the side of SPES $\gamma$, medical applications are the major goal. The properties of radioactive nuclei combined with molecular behavior in human body is of great advantage to diagnosis and therapy in nuclear medicine.
SPES $\gamma$ was designed to pursue the aim of studying the production of innovative radionuclides for medicine starting from the assumption that every new radioisotope may show unprecedented biological properties and that these properties may contribute to finding solutions to still open clinical problems.
