Research Highlights
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.”
Fall 2024 Research Opportunities in SBU Physics & Astronomy Survey Results
It is oftentimes difficult for students to know which professors have paid/unpaid
research positions for PhD, MA, and undergraduate
students.
Professors also face a similar issue in that they do not know how to reach students who might be interested in doing research with them.
The typical avenues for bridging this gap include finding each other in classes, sending emails, knocking on doors, connecting through program directors, etc.
The purpose of this survey database is not meant to replace the above processes, but perhaps make the process of finding a research advisor a bit easier.
In this survey, faculty members disclose their paid/unpaid research position openings for PhD, MA, and undergraduate students. Faculty members also provide a quick summary of their research.
The detailed survey results can be found here.
Nature Chemistry: Collisional Alignment and Molecular Rotation Control the Chemi-ionization
of Individual Conformers of Hydroquinone with Metastable Neon
A newly published review article has recently been published in Nature Chemistry coauthored by Dr. Jesus Pérez-Ríos! In this work, Dr. Pérez-Ríos and his collaborators
focus on a central tenet in chemistry: the relationship between the shape of a molecule
and its chemical reactivity.
Chemi-ionization (CI) reactions are important in plasmas, planetary atmospheres and interstellar space, reactive collisions with quantum effects, and other energetic environments. In this study, the authors deployed an experiment utilizing electrostatic deflection to separate individual conformers of 1,4-dihydroxybenzene (hydroquinone, HYQ) within a molecular beam. These conformers differ by a single bond rotation (as shown in the figure below), which leads to different dipole moments. These are intersected with another beam containing metastable neon atoms in the excited (2p)5(3s)13P2,0 states (Ne* ) that ionize the molecular collision partner.
Schematic of the setup and geometries of the polar cis- and apolar trans-HYQ. Differences
in effective dipole moment between the two conformers lead to spatial separation after
passing through the electrostatic deflector.
Research Groups and Connected Research Centers