The IsoSpin Laboratory initiative

Radioactive Nuclear Beams (RNB) and the research opportunities they afford have attracted worldwide interest. In a recent report a group of scientists has recommended that the North American Nuclear Physics community should seriously pursue the construction of a dedicated, flexible, broad-range RNB facility that would provide intense beams of nearly all elements up to energies of ∼10 MeV/u for a program of scientific studies in nuclear structure, low-energy nuclear reactions, astrophysics, and atomic and material science. This initiative has tentatively been given the name IsoSpin Laboratory (ISL). The RNB production method chosen for the ISL is based on the coupling of two accelerators: the first to deliver a high current light ion beam (.5--1 GeV) to a spallation target and the second for the acceleration of the emanating radioactive species. The expected beam intensities will vary from about 1011 1/s near stability to a few per second for beams with the most extreme N/Z ratios. Several characteristics of the ISL are complementary to RNB facilities based on the projectile fragmentation method