Active research is a crucial part of our effort to be outstanding teachers of physics and astronomy.
Students participate actively in most of our research, either through the thesis programs or as paid summer interns. The following abstracts describe our current research fields. We are studying collisional transfer between find structure levels of the barium atom at about 4.5 eV above the ground state. Our technique also requires that we determine the radiative lifetimes of these levels. It is known that in this case, fusion during the initial seconds of a Friedmann expansion is very efficient, warming up the matter and turning most of it into heavy elements.