The Radioactive Eye: A Nuclear Physics Mystery Unraveled

In 2013, the Chair of the Department of Physics at Tennessee Tech University was approached by a physician at the regional hospital with a question: do you have anyone with experience in gamma-ray detection? One of his patients had been treated with radioactive seed implants as a child in the 1960s and now wanted them removed. However, the documentation was conflicting, and they wished for us to determine the isotope used in the seeds. As a then-freshly-minted Assistant Professor who had, so far, spent her entire career looking for rare nuclear decays using germanium detectors, I jumped at the challenge. As I worked on this puzzle, I realized how many tools from my training in nuclear physics and particle detection I was using to answer this one question. With permission from the patient, I developed this mystery into a training exercise for undergraduate students who are brand new to nuclear physics research. This exercise exposes the student to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) databases, the National Nuclear Data Center (NNDC) Chart of the Nuclides, and gamma-ray spectroscopy techniques using germanium detectors. Depending on the needs of the student, you can utilize ROOT, python, or even Microsoft Excel to analyze the data. The exercise can be adapted for first-year undergraduate students all the way to first-year graduate students. Over the subsequent years, I refined the exercise, and recently, piloted a more formal, multi-day version for the final PIRE-GEMADARC Summer School. Here, I will present the puzzle to you, outline the structure of the resultant training exercise, and present plans for improvement and dissemination.