Brookhaven National Laboratory

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 Kent State University, is among 65 students from 29 states recently selected for funding by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program. The program aspires to “address societal challenges at national and international scale.”

A gold–gold 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 Kent State University College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Physics who performs research in experimental nuclear physics. His data analysis of some rare particles called “charm quarks” 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 U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Science Bulletin.

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 Kent State University and all over the world have been searching for violations of the fundamental symmetries in the universe for decades. Much like the “Big Bang” (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.