Research Highlights
Clearest and Most Precise Images of the Universe’s Infancy Revealed
Research by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration has produced new images that are the clearest yet of the universe’s infancy – the earliest cosmic time accessible; the images are of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation that was visible only 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
The international collaboration of scientists includes astrophysicist Neelima Sehgal, PhD, and her group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University. The Stony Brook team has played an essential role within the collaboration in analyzing the CMB, the afterglow light from the Big Bang.
The new images measure light that traveled for more than 13 billion years to reach the ACT high in the Chilean Andes and reveal the universe at about 380,000 years old, which the team considers the equivalent of hours-old baby pictures of the cosmos, now in about middle-age.
“We are seeing the first steps towards making the earliest stars and galaxies,” says Suzanne Staggs, Director of ACT and Henry deWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. “And we’re not just seeing light and dark, we’re seeing the polarization of light in high resolution. That is a defining factor distinguishing ACT from Planck and other, earlier telescopes.”
The research team says these results confirm a simple model of the universe and have ruled out most competing alternatives. The new images of the CMB add higher definition to those observed a decade ago by the Planck space-based telescope. Their findings were presented at the American Physical Society Annual Meeting on March 19.
PRL Editor's Choice: Entanglement as a Probe of Hadronization
A recent publication in Physical Review Letters, by scientists at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Lab, was selected as an Editor's Choice. The work was done by Research Scientist Jaydeep Datta, Distinguished Professors Abhay Deshpande and Dimitri Kharzeev, Post Doctoral Fellow Charles Joseph Naïm, and Adjunct Associate Professor Zhoudunming Tu.
Previous work had discovered that the proton structure at high energies exhibits maximal entanglement, leading to a simple relation between the proton’s parton distributions and the entropy of hadrons produced in high-energy inelastic interactions, which has been experimentally confirmed.
In this work, the authors extended this approach to the production of jets, where the maximal entanglement predicts a relation between the jet fragmentation function and the entropy of hadrons produced in jet fragmentation. This relation was tested using the ATLAS Collaboration data on jet production at the Large Hadron Collider, and there was good agreement between the prediction based on maximal entanglement within the jet and the data.
This study represents the first use of a quantum entanglement framework in an experimental study of the hadronization process, offering a new perspective on the transition from perturbative to nonperturbative QCD. These results open the door to a more comprehensive understanding of the quantum nature of hadronization.
High-Voltage Gun Accelerates Electrons from Zero to 80 … Percent the Speed of Light
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed and tested the world’s highest voltage polarized electron gun, a key piece of technology needed for building the world’s first fully polarized Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). The EIC, a state-of-the-art nuclear physics facility being built at Brookhaven in partnership with DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), will accelerate and collide polarized electrons with polarized protons and ions — atoms stripped of their electrons — so scientists can investigate the innermost building blocks of visible matter.
“This gun not only exceeds the EIC requirements, but we also get world-leading results,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Erdong Wang, the chief architect and implementor of the device.
Wang proposed the electron gun as a research and development project back in 2017 and has been spearheading its design, engineering, assembly, and testing ever since. Much of the work and all the testing were done at Stony Brook University (SBU), a partner in Brookhaven Science Associates, the entity that manages Brookhaven Lab on behalf of DOE. The project drew on the expertise of scientific and technical staff and graduate students there and at several EIC collaborating institutions, including Jefferson Lab, Old Dominion University, and others.
EIC Science Director Abhay Deshpande, a professor of physics at SBU who is also serving as Brookhaven Lab’s interim associate laboratory director for Nuclear and Particle Physics, said, “This project is a great example of the strong collaboration between Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook, particularly for research in nuclear physics and the development of technologies needed for the EIC.”
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