At the Legnaro National Laboratories (LNL), the SPES (Selective Production of Exotic Species) project continues on its path towards achieving its objectives: studying nuclear matter in extreme conditions, and producing radionuclides for the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac and oncological diseases. The infrastructure, which has at its heart a cyclotron capable of accelerating up to a maximum of 4.5 million billion protons per second, is in an advanced stage of construction. To date, the project is organized into five phases. In the summer of 2024, the conclusion of phase 1 marked the restart of beam operations after a period of downtime for the modernization of the cyclotron, and allowed the testing of a beam line with the observation of the gamma decay of the theranostic radionuclide copper-67. Now, just six months after the first result, and in the midst of phase 2, the most coveted goal of the project has been achieved: the production of a beam of unstable ions (with a very short average life) at low energy, a fundamental prerequisite for the nuclear physics research that SPES aims to carry out.
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