Searching for the Missing First Excited ½+ State of ⁹B

The first excited ½+ state of the nucleus ⁹B has eluded many attempts to find it for years, yet theory still shows that it should be present around 1 MeV in excitation energy. Finding the location and the width of this state in ⁹B would confirm theoretical predictions and systematics in nuclei with 9 nucleons (A = 9). Several previous experimental attempts to find this state yielded inconclusive evidence of its existence. We performed this experiment to look for this elusive ½+ state in ⁹B at the John D. Fox laboratory at Florida State University. A ³He beam was used to bombard a metallic ⁷Li target. The CATRiNA neutron detector array was used to measure the resulting neutrons from the 7Li(3He, n)9B reaction. In this work, I will present optimizations to the experimental setup to minimize neutron background as well as preliminary results of the experiment.