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| Marc Loiselet | Nancy Postiau | Laurent Standaert |
On 8 March 2021, Nancy Postiau and Laurent Standaert were designated CRC platform responsible and responsible-adjoint, respectively, by the “comité de gestion du CRC”. Nancy Postiau takes over the CRC leadership from Marc Loiselet, who has been in charge since 2008 and retires at the end of April 2021. The “comité de gestion du CRC”, which ratified these designations, wished all the best to Nancy Postiau and Laurent Standaert and thanked warmly Marc Loiselet for the excellent leadership he has provided over all these years.
The CRC
The Cyclotron Resources Centre (CRC) is one of the largest technological platforms of UCLouvain. Since November 2018 the CRC is officially attached to the IRMP institute.
The CRC has heavy ion, proton, neutron and gamma ray beam testing facilities to characterize the radiation resistance of electronic components. In addition to UCLouvain researchers, these facilities are used by a very wide range of users active in space, avionics and high energy physics. Among them can be found prestigious international institutions (ESA, CERN), national research institutes (CNES, CEA ...), but also private companies. The CRC facilities also allow polymer films to be irradiated with heavy ions and are currently used by industrial partners such as General Electric Healthcare, Sabeu and it4ip.
On May 17, 2019, the European Physical Society (EPS) decided to include the CRC target hall in its list of "EPS Historic Sites". An excerpt from the EPS appointment letter is included at the end of this article. There are currently only two other such sites in Belgium: the Hotel Metropole in Brussels ('In 1911, the Hotel was the venue of the Solvay Council, dedicated to what soon would be called “The Theory of Radiation & the Quanta” ') and the Heilige-Geest college in Leuven ('Georges Lemaître, original founder of the theory of the Big Bang,… developed in this college his ideas about an expanding universe consistent with theory and observations ..').
A series of events, including the placement of a commemorative plaque, will take place on October 12, 2021 at the Hemptinne building.
The CRC personnel:
Supervision: Marc Loiselet, Nancy Postiau, Laurent Standaert
Projects and developments: Francois-Philippe Hocquet, Jérôme Prevost, Thomas Debecquevort, Nicolas Szilasi (part-time CRC)
Operation and technical support: Nordin Abdelkhalek, Adrien Hubert, Pascal Jonckman, Pascal Leclercq, Maxime Rouchet, Kaihow Souphan and Grégory Urbain
General support: Frédéric Amand, Carine Baras (40%, secretariat), Christine Thielens (accounting)
Nancy Postiau is a civil engineer in materials science, orientation physique, graduated from UCLouvain. She has worked at the CRC since 1990
Laurent Standaert is a physicist graduated from UNamur. He has worked at the CRC since 2011.
Marc Loiselet has a doctorate in physics from UCLouvain. He has worked at the CRC since the start of his career in 1981, and earlier for his PhD thesis.
Excerpt from the nomination letter of the CRC as a historic EPS site:
Nomination of the cyclotron hall of the “Center de Resources du Cyclotron -CRC” of the Université Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) as an EPS Historic Site.
Birthplace of post-accelerated “exotic beams” in nuclear physics research
At the “Center de Resources du Cyclotron -CRC” of the Université Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) the first “exotic beam”, a post-accelerated radioactive beam, was produced in 1989 by coupling two cyclotrons through an isotope separator on-line (ISOL) method.
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Since then, major facilities for radioactive ion beam reaction studies have been and are being constructed in Europe (HIE ISOLDE - CERN, SPIRAL - GANIL, FAIR - GSI, SPES - LNL) and elsewhere (TRIUMF - Canada, Lanzhou - China, RIKEN - Japan and FRIB - USA).
The advanced technologies and instrumentation developed to produce and use these energetic radioactive ion beams, often with very weak intensities, has allowed the exploration of new regions of the nuclear chart and unravel intricate aspects of the strong and weak interaction in the nuclear medium. This has led to a shift from a phenomenological picture to nuclear theory grounded in the Standard Model.
Furthermore, the availability of a large diversity of radioactive ion beams is reaching fields beyond nuclear physics including astrophysics, atomic physics, condensed-matter physics and applications in life science