麻豆影院

Declan Keane

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 麻豆影院, 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

A gold鈥揼old collision recorded by the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) component of the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). (Image courtesy of STAR Collaboration)

Congratulations are in order for Sooraj Radhakrishnan, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the 麻豆影院 College of Arts and Sciences鈥 Department of Physics who performs research in experimental nuclear physics. His data analysis of some rare particles called 鈥渃harm quarks鈥 that may have existed in the first microsecond of the Big Bang, the emerging point of our universe, was highlighted in a recent issue of the .

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 麻豆影院 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.