'Berg Recieves Grant to Support Student Research in Nuclear Physics
Muhlenberg College has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), in the amount of $153,000 over three years, that will support student research in nuclear physics.Friday, August 14, 2009 11:22 AM
Much of the award will aid the summer research program initiated by Assistant Professor of Physics Brett Fadem. Each year, four or five students accompany Fadem to Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) to work with the PHENIX collaboration. Six Nobel prizes have been awarded for research conducted at BNL. The PHENIX collaboration has built (and with the help of Muhlenberg College, continues to upgrade) a world-class detector to analyze collisions of atomic nuclei produced by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). To date, PHENIX has published 80 papers in the finest physics journals, and the discovery of a new state of matter at RHIC was listed by the American Physical Society as the Story of the Year in 2005.
In addition to helping with the construction of a new detecting subsystem for PHENIX, Muhlenberg is engaged in an analysis project using existing data that will help to probe the very hot matter created in RHIC collisions. In addition to the work at BNL, a portion of the award will be used to build an undergraduate teaching laboratory in nuclear physics on site at Muhlenberg.
The NSF is an independent US government agency responsible for promoting science and engineering through research programs and education projects.
