The FRIB is located on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI, making it the only facility of its kind in the world located on a university campus. Apparently because of limited physical space on campus, the linear accelerator is bizarrely folded into three sections, like a paper clip. The maximum beam energy is 295 MeV per nucleon and the accelerator is capable of accelerating any stable nucleus. Up to seven different primary beams have already been used in experiments, since the facility became operational in the summer of 2022.  The beam strikes a fixed target, and nuclear fragments ripped from the beam and target nuclei are collected by a magnetic spectrometer system according to their charge to mass ratio, so that a beam of specific nuclei of any ratio of Z to A can be formed and studied.

In addition to ambitious goals in the field of nuclear chemistry, the facility is touted as being able to provide basic nuclear structure information that can be used as the basis of extremely detailed and realistic theoretical models of nuclei, starting from first principles. Another main item on the wish list of all these facilities, FRIB, FAIR and NICA, is of course to try to pin down more specific details about the nuclear equation of state, that can be compared directly to Lattice Gauge Theory calculations.