Break up in Buenos Aires

Alberto Pacheco presented what I found was the most clear description of break up reactions so far. Perhaps it was that I was blogging the talk and payed 'extra attention'. Perhaps it was that he restricted the explanations of break up to the bare essentials - referring to the talks from last week for additional information. It worked for me.

We learned how break up is a reaction when something breakups. We detect the pieces flying out, and from there we'd like to understand what happened. It's not so simple as it sounds. Experimentalists collect information on energy and momentum of the reaction products, in a limited set of detectors. This must be used to reconstruct how the reaction proceed (with SUPERKINETICO code), and understand which of the many alternative processes we group in the breakup bag took place. Understanding breakup is an advancement of science in itself, but it also contributes to fields such as astrophysics (better understanding of capture reactions through Coulomb dissociation), and reaction theory (to enhance or reduce fission by breakup? such is the question).

He showed results for 6Li+144Sm, and 7Li+144Sm, but I missed what the results had to say about the aforementioned questions. It would also had been nice to have some words about the Tandar lab, which I think was for the first time a main character in the plot.