What would you do with $10,000? After receiving the Carl Westcott Fellowship for his exceptional work on TRIUMF’s Ion Trap for Atomic and Nuclear Science (TITAN) project, Maxime Brodeur is still thinking about what he will do with his award. "I don’t know yet," he says, "I’m not really a big spender." Nevertheless, Brodeur has spent a lot of time on the TITAN project at TRIUMF during his Masters and present Ph.D. work with Jens Dilling, a TRIUMF research scientist and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia.
As the 21st winner of the Carl Westcott Fellowship, a portion of Brodeur’s Ph.D. project used TITAN’s Penning trap mass spectrometer for the measurement of exotic nuclei. Brodeur worked with measuring halo nuclide Helium-8, which has a short half-life of 0.119 seconds. Working with such short-lived nuclei using TITAN gave Brodeur an edge that led him to win the Fellowship. Working on TITAN since 2004, Brodeur has gained valuable hands-on experience from the project’s planning through to its construction and testing, and finally to conducting mass-measurement experiments.
Brodeur's interest in physics was sparked in an undergraduate class in nuclear physics; since then, Brodeur has been conducting research and experiments in this field. Brodeur received his undergraduate physics degree from l’Université de Montréal where he first experienced research at TRIUMF during a summer internship position with the BaBar experiment. "It was my summer internship at TRIUMF that caused me to want to come back and work on different projects," says Brodeur, "The people here and atmosphere had a positive impact on me." Returning to TRIUMF for his Masters and Ph.D., Brodeur is continuing his detailed work on Helium-8 with TITAN.
The Carl Westcott Fellowship was initiated in 1986 to commemorate Dr. Carl Westcott (1912-1977) who was a leader in Canadian nuclear physics research. The award is granted on an annual basis to a TRIUMF graduate student. For more information on the Carl Westcott Fellowship, please visit http://www.triumf.info/public/students/awards/westcott.php .
Congratulations to Maxime on this outstanding recognition!
By Nicole Dublanko
TRIUMF's Communications Assistant