DETAILS

Date: Thursday, 24 March 2022
Time: 11:00-12:00 (SAST) 9am (GMT)
Platform: Zoom

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BACKGROUND

The collaboration between the Universities of the Western Cape (UWC), Zululand (UniZulu) and York (UK) is a long-standing one. Together, Profs David Jenkins (York), Sifiso Ntshangase (UniZulu) and Nico Orce (UWC) proposed the first African-led experiment at CERN in 2012 and together we ran the so-called Ubuntu experiment in July 2017. Now our postdoctoral fellow Kenzo Abrahams (PhD from UWC) is closing that loop and has submitted to the collaboration the first draft of what will certainly become the first research article in nuclear physics led by an African student from work done at CERN. It will be submitted to Nature Physics.

While at CERN, we discussed the possibility of exchange programmes and building state-of-the-art nuclear physics laboratories at UWC and UniZulu, and together we submitted a funding application to the Global Challenge Research Fund at the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK. Our Phase-1 application was approved in 2018, which considered the development of new laboratories able to run fast digital electronics and data acquisition systems to carry out modern experiments and develop new kind of detectors to support GAMKA (largest grant ever given by the National Research Foundation in South Africa in a competitive call) and experiments at CERN. We successfully accomplished the tasks, which involved the refurbishment of old labs and procurement of new equipment. The first results arrived at the end of 2019, with the collection of the first gamma-ray spectrum using the digital system and the new capability to run novel experiments.

In the process, about 20 students from UWC and UniZulu went to the University of York for intense training with radiation detectors and computer simulations between 2018 and 2020 (right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic). This resulted not only in technology-transfer  but in the gain of self-confidence and motivation to excel here in South Africa. We also organised the IX and X Tastes of Nuclear Physics together in 2019 and 2020. The first was held at UniZulu and became one of the most successful international conferences in the country, with about 200 participants, mostly black South Africans and about 50 world-class speakers. The second was online and comprised over 600 participants from all over the world in what it became the prime event of the year in Nuclear Physics.

Our success in Phase 1 prompted us to submit a new application for Phase 2, where the foundations to carry out applied-nuclear-physics experiments were laid. It was also approved (for a total of about R10M). Here we pursued the principles of high-resolution cancer imaging by using the fastest digitizer in the world and a special set up composed of plastic-scintillator and sodium-iodine detectors inside a vacuum chamber. Alike detectors face each other to take advantage of the principles of quantum entanglement in order to reduce radiation background and reach the best high-resolution cancer imaging. A publication in Nature Communications has recently been published by our colleagues at York which shows the method. It is our purpose to hold the patent and bring this new and cheaper technology to the poor communities of the African continent.

In November-December 2021, we all went to UniZulu to help setting up MANDELA with our colleagues and friends. MANDELA laboratories are now fully operational at UWC and UniZulu with the fastest digital systems, high-performing computers, modern experimental set ups, particle and gamma detectors and high-end 3D printers, they serve our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes where our students take full advantage of modern laboratory practicals and support new detector development at CERN, and ancillary detectors  to be coupled with GAMKA together with the required big data analysis that comes with additional detector complexity. Lots of work has been done so far and more is needed though to fully develop these new technologies in South Africa.  As one approaches the MANDELA laboratories at UWC and UniZulu, one can read at the entrance “It always seems impossible until it's done.” Nelson Mandela. The thing is that we just don’t read it, we actually do the impossibles. GAMKA, CERN or MANDELA are only a few examples.

Finally we have to say that none of this could have been possible without the general support of the different departments and UWC, UniZulu and York. We’d like to sincerely  thank the finance, media, Institutional Advancement, HR, ICS, International Relations offices for their monumental support throughout these years. And can’t forget the financial support by UWC and UniZulu that brought altogether this project to completion.

For more information, visit https://nuclear.uwc.ac.za/