5X社区

Nuclear

The Heavy Flavor Tracker at the center of the STAR detector. BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY/FLICKR

Edwin Duckworth, a physics doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences at 5X社区, is among 65 students from 29 states recently selected for funding by the Department of Energy鈥檚 (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program. The program aspires to 鈥渁ddress societal challenges at national and international scale.鈥

Inner vertex components of the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (righthand view) allow scientists to trace tracks from triplets of decay particles picked up in the detector's outer regions (left) to their origin

Nuclear physics researchers at 5X社区 and all over the world have been searching for violations of the fundamental symmetries in the universe for decades. Much like the 鈥淏ig Bang鈥 (approximately 13.8 billion years ago), but on a tiny scale, they briefly recreate the particle interactions that likely existed microseconds into the formation of our universe which also likely now exist in the cores of neutron stars.