Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence as an Educational Tool for the Next Generation of Safeguards Specialists

Nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) is a powerful technique for assaying and identifying material, and one that is being actively explored for its potential in safeguards. It is an equally powerful technique for educating students in safeguards. It provides many ready projects appropriately scaled to student involvement that exposes to fundamental physics for applications, as well as experimental technique. The fundamental physics of NRF highlights nuclear structure as well as radiation physics. The NRF experiments are being done at university facilities, enabling students to gain hands on experience with detectors, accelerators, and radioactive material that would be difficult to impossible at the national laboratories where safeguards research is normally conducted. This talk will discuss several basic NRF measurements highlighting student participation. These will include the first NRF measurement on 237Np, the first NRF measurements using a mono-energetic ?-ray beam on 232Th, a novel approach using radioactive sources for NRF, and the new bremsstrahlung source being built at UC Berkeley.