Center for Nuclear Research

The Kent State University Department of Physics is proud to welcome our newest faculty member, Dr. Zhangbu Xu.

Dr. Michael Strickland's group will participate in a new Topical Theory Collaboration funded by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics to explore the behavior of heavy flavor particles. The collaboration will receive $2.5 Million from the DOE Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, over five years. That funding will provide partial support for six graduate students and three postdoctoral fellows at 10 institutions, as well as a senior staff position at one of the national laboratories. It will also establish a bridge junior faculty position at Kent State University.

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.”

Veronica Dexheimer

What happens when two neutron stars collide? What extreme densities and temperatures are reached? What new states of matter exist within the core of a neutron star? One Kent State College of Arts and Sciences theoretical astrophysicist, Veronica Dexheimer, associate professor in the Department of Physics, is diving headfirst into these questions as a co-principal investigator collaborating with her peers at multiple institutions on a recently funded cyberinfrastucture research grant project.

Tracey Motter stands in front of a lush bush on the Kent State campus.

Although widely acknowledged that greater diversity among nurses reduces health disparities and improves quality of care, the U.S. nursing workforce does not mirror the nation’s increasingly diverse population.

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.