Herman Named Head of National Nuclear Data Center at BNL

Michal Herman enlarge

Michal Herman, Head of the National Nuclear Data Center at BNL

Brookhaven physicist Michal Herman has been selected to head the National Nuclear Data Center (NNDC), a worldwide resource for nuclear data located at Brookhaven. Herman has succeeded Pavel Oblozinsky, who served as director since 2002. The NNDC collects, evaluates, archives and disseminates nuclear physics data for basic nuclear research and for applied nuclear technologies.

Herman came to Brookhaven in 2003 following six years at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, where he managed international nuclear data development projects. He served as a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and has also worked at the National Institute for Energy and Environment in Bologna, Italy, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Messina, Italy, and at the Institute of Nuclear Research in Warsaw, Poland. Herman received his Master of Physics degree from the University of Warsaw and his Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from the Institute of Nuclear Research in Warsaw.

The NNDC specializes in compilation and evaluation of nuclear structure and low-energy nuclear reactions, maintains nuclear databases and makes use of modern information technology to disseminate the results. The information available to its users is the product of the combined efforts of the NNDC and cooperating data centers and other interested groups, both in the United States and worldwide. There are two other major data banks operated by international organizations, one in Paris (OECD with dominant contribution from the European Union) and another one in Vienna (IAEA). Several countries including Japan, Russia, China and South Korea have strong nuclear data program contributing to the network.

"We track anything having to do with nuclear structure and nuclear cross-sections, the latter measuring the probability of certain reactions taking place," Herman said. The data are kept in dedicated numerical libraries, which are periodically reevaluated and updated.

Herman said that while their customer base may be limited, the Center has the most accessed website at the Laboratory, aside from the BNL home page. In 2006, the Center reached an important milestone of "1 million plus" Web database retrievals. In FY2008 this number approached two millions. Herman noted that the Center has had many successes in recent years.

"Retrievals have doubled every other year, on average, for the past five or six years," he said. 'We have redone all of our web services and information is now easier to retrieve, more understandable, and more attractive due to extended plotting capabilities. We are doing our best to strengthen our link with user communities. The grand vision that I have is that in ten years, we will have a unification of reaction and structure data and capability of simultaneous evaluation of all materials in the reaction library ENDF/B. The focal point will be quantification of data uncertainties along with their correlations or covariances."

The NNDC has provided more than a half-century of data and expertise to the world community, tracing its roots back to 1952, when the name Brookhaven Neutron Cross Section Compilation Group was adopted for a group in the Physics Department at BNL. This group published the first edition of the well-known reference book BNL-325 (Neutron Cross Sections) in 1955. The group's name was changed to the Sigma Center in 1961 and it was moved to the Reactor Physics Division of the Nuclear Engineering Department. It became the National Neutron Cross Section Center in 1967 and finally NNDC in 1977, when it was given the additional responsibility for nuclear structure and decay data. The NNDC's current staff size is 14, including 8 Ph.D.s and 2 post-docs. The group includes scientific, professional, and support staff. In addition, NNDC normally hosts several regular guest scientists and short-term visiting scientists.

2009-1106  |  INT/EXT  |  Newsroom