Photos

Key takeaways

• Aerosols are major drivers of virus transmission
• The performance of air disinfection techniques is hard to measure, but a new fluorescence-based method speeds up the process.
• The researchers aim to use it to improve their air disinfection technology, which can deactivate up to 99.9% of virus particles with plasma.

Newswise — The effectiveness of air disinfection devices may now be measured in minutes, rather than hours, with a new technique from University of Michigan Engineering. This is important for researchers developing better antiviral air purifiers, helping to mitigate outbreaks of viral respiratory diseases and prepare for the next pandemic.

The new method harnesses a property known as UV fluorescence, or how molecules absorb UV light, followed shortly thereafter by emission of energy at another wavelength. It turns out viral aerosols shine brighter before disinfection treatment than after. This finding offers the potential to indirectly but rapidly track the performance of air disinfection technologies and more. 

“Our findings suggest that it may be possible to detect changes in aerosol infectivity in a rapid, real-time manner without tedious laboratory procedures,” said Zhenyu Ma, a U-M postdoctoral research fellow and first author of the study in Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing. “As the field of application for this technology becomes clearer, we could use it to better understand the behavior of pathogenic aerosols and their infectivity, thereby providing essential information for public health guidelines.”

The speed of the new approach, developed in the lab of Herek Clack, U-M associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, is key. The standard method of evaluating an air disinfection process requires collecting pathogen samples from air before and after treatment. For viruses, it involves exposing host cells to the pathogen sample so that the viruses have something to infect. Then, technicians look for signs of infection through a microscope, a labor-intensive process that yields just a single measurement of air disinfection performance. 

In contrast, U-M’s approach yields results after several minutes of sampling a small portion of the air stream entering, and then exiting, an air disinfection device or chamber. The sampled air streams flow separately into a device that measures the size of each particle, exposes it to UV light and measures the intensity of its glow. With thousands of these measurements taken over a couple of minutes of sampling, naturally occurring particle-to-particle variations cause the fluorescence intensity measurements to take the shape of a bell curve. 

This bell curve shifts to lower intensities as the fraction of viral aerosols inactivated by the disinfection process increases. As a result, researchers can measure the fluorescence intensity of the air sample before and after the disinfection process and compare them to figure out how well disinfection worked. 

Once the expected shift in the bell curve is known for a particular pathogen, between treated and untreated viruses, the effectiveness determination takes just a few minutes. For researchers like Clack, who develop disinfection processes, this means faster prototyping and testing at different air flow rates, air temperatures, humidity levels and more.

“Even as the paradigm has shifted regarding the significance of airborne disease transmission, air disinfection technologies that do not rely on filtering air suffer slow development cycles because of how tedious it traditionally has been to prove how well the pathogens have been inactivated,” Clack said. “Having an indirect indicator, properly calibrated, for pathogen infectivity could speed up that development process tremendously.”

Fluorescence monitoring could also be effective for disinfection tools such as ozone and chlorine, the researchers suggest. But for techniques that disrupt the virus’ genome, such as ultraviolet light, fluorescence will not work. The genome is too deep inside the virus to be reached by these fluorescence detection methods, so their fluorescence signatures don’t change in the same way.

Clack’s group studies interactions between aerosols and strong electric fields. These fields produce nonthermal plasmas, or regions containing charged molecular fragments, which damage viruses and render them harmless. Their group has demonstrated that nonthermal plasmas are capable of reducing the number of infectious viruses in flowing air by 99.9% in lab testing as well as at enclosed livestock operations. 

Clack’s startup, Taza Aya, has prototyped plasma-based respiratory protective gear, currently being tested in a Michigan turkey processing plant.

Study: Using Viral Aerosol Fluorescence for Detection of Virus Infectivity Change Induced by Non-thermal Plasma (DOI: 10.10007/s11090-026-10648-6)  

Story by Jim Lynch, Michigan Engineering

Newswise — Two researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have been named recipients of 2025 Early Career Research Program awards from the DOE Office of Science. David Kaphan and Yong Zhao will each receive $550,000 per year for five years to further their research.

This DOE Office of Science program seeks to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to outstanding researchers early in their careers, when many scientists make formative contributions. Awardees were selected from a large pool of applicants from universities and national labs based on peer review by scientific experts.

David Kaphan is a chemist in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division. His research focuses on designing a new generation of catalysts — materials that speed up chemical reactions — for chemical transformations to overcome key kinetic limitations of today’s catalysts. His project aims to explore the potential of electric field-responsive oxides, such as ferroelectrics, to actively control the surface-level electronic characteristics of catalytic active sites. This approach could enable the development of catalysts that adapt during chemical transformations, optimizing reactivity for different phases of chemical synthesis processes.

Kaphan’s project will study the complex role that external electric fields can play in the modulation of electronic surface properties during catalytic processes. He will use X-ray absorption spectroscopy techniques and other methods at the Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials — both DOE Office of Science user facilities at Argonne — to measure properties such as field responsive surface electron density and catalytic reactivity. Additionally, the project will integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the exploration of reaction parameters and electric field conditions. This work has the potential to revolutionize catalyst design for critical processes such as selective methane oxidation and ammonia synthesis.

“Stimulus-responsive, nonequilibrium catalysis represents an exciting opportunity to overcome the classical limitations of static processes and increase efficiency in chemical transformations,” said Kaphan. ​“This support will allow us to explore new frontiers in field-responsive dynamic catalyst design and develop new solutions to address key challenges in energy-related chemistry.”

Yong Zhao is an assistant physicist in the Physics division. His research seeks to address one of the most fundamental questions in nuclear physics: understanding the internal structure of protons and neutrons. These are key objectives of multidimensional proton imaging efforts at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Both protons and neutrons consist of different combinations of quarks and gluons. Zhao plans to develop a new theoretical approach and use lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) for precise calculations of the underlying multidimensional quark and gluon structures. This approach will enable high-precision imaging of the proton, as well as reveal the contributions of quark and gluon spin and orbital angular momentum to the proton’s spin.

Using the Aurora and Polaris supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility, Zhao’s project aims to reduce systematic uncertainties and improve numerical precision in proton and neutron structural studies. Its insights will provide crucial theoretical guidance for experiments at Jefferson Lab, Brookhaven and other facilities.

“This award is a tremendous opportunity to push the boundaries of our understanding of the strong force and the fundamental building blocks of matter,” said Zhao. ​“I am grateful for the support that will allow us to make significant strides in this area of research.”

“David and Yong exemplify the innovative spirit and scientific excellence that are hallmarks of Argonne’s research community,” said Kawtar Hafidi, associate laboratory director for Argonne’s Physical Sciences and Engineering directorate. ​“Their groundbreaking work has the potential to transform our understanding of fundamental processes in physics and address key challenges in research and development. I look forward to seeing the impact of their efforts in the years to come.”

About Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials

The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://​sci​ence​.osti​.gov/​U​s​e​r​-​F​a​c​i​l​i​t​i​e​s​/​U​s​e​r​-​F​a​c​i​l​i​t​i​e​s​-​a​t​-​a​-​G​lance.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

Newswise — Woods Hole, Mass. (February 4, 2026) – Alan Seltzer, an affiliated scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), assistant professor at University College Dublin, and former WHOI postdoctoral scholar, has been named the 2026 recipient of the F.G. Houtermans Award by the European Association of Geochemistry (EAG). The award is among the highest international honors recognizing early-career scientists in geochemistry.

Seltzer is being recognized for pioneering the use of dissolved gas isotopes to quantify physical and biogeochemical processes across the Earth system, including exploring the sensitivity of groundwater systems to climate and the dynamics of atmosphere-ocean gas exchange. Much of the work cited by the award committee was conducted at WHOI, where Seltzer was a postdoctoral scholar from 2019 to 2021 and later a member of the scientific staff in the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department, where he established a gas isotope tracer laboratory and developed several new analytical techniques.

His research helped open new pathways for using noble gas and nitrogen isotopes to investigate groundwater, seawater, air, and volcanic gases. Seltzer also helped extend high-precision noble gas isotope techniques to volcanic systems in collaboration with WHOI associate scientist Peter Barry to better understand the origins and transport pathways of volatiles from Earth’s deep interior. He also expanded oceanic applications of noble gas tracers for air-sea interaction and glacial meltwater circulation with WHOI scientists Bill Jenkins and Roo Nicholson, and more recently advanced high-precision tools for quantifying nitrogen cycling in aquatic environments in collaboration with MIT-WHOI Joint Program student Katelyn McPaul and WHOI associate scientist Scott Wankel.

“It is an honor to be recognized with the F.G. Houtermans Award,” Seltzer said. “WHOI has a special culture in which collaboration and high-risk science are celebrated, and without the encouragement and freedom at WHOI to take risks, push analytical limits, and fail a lot along the way, much of my work would not have been possible. I’m deeply grateful for all the support I’ve received from the WHOI community over my career so far.”

Seltzer’s selection continues a notable streak for WHOI’s Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department. Former WHOI postdoctoral scholar David Bekaert received the Houtermans Award in 2025, marking back-to-back years in which the honor has gone to WHOI-trained scientists—a rare distinction that highlights the strength and impact of the Institution’s postdoctoral program.

The 2026 F.G. Houtermans Award will be formally presented at the Goldschmidt Conference in July.

About Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate an understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. Top scientists, engineers, and students collaborate on more than 800 concurrent projects worldwide—both above and below the waves—pushing the boundaries of knowledge and possibility. 

Newswise — New work from Georgia Tech is showing how a simple glass of wine can serve as a powerful gateway for understanding advanced research and technologies.

The project, inspired by an Atlanta Science Festival event hosted by School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Assistant Professor Andrew McShan, develops an innovative outreach and teaching module around nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques, and is designed for easy adoption in introductory chemistry and biochemistry courses. 

Published earlier this year in the Journal of Chemical Education, the study, “Automated Chemical Profiling of Wine by Solution NMR Spectroscopy: A Demonstration for Outreach and Education” was led by a team from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry including lead author McShan, Ph.D. students Lily Capeci, Elizabeth A. Corbin, Ruoqing Jia, Miriam K. Simma, and F. N. U. Vidya, Academic Professional Mary E. Peek, and Georgia Tech NMR Center Co-Directors Johannes E. Leisen and Hongwei Wu.

“NMR is one of the most widely used analytical tools in chemistry and the life sciences, and Georgia Tech hosts one of the most cutting-edge NMR centers in the world,” McShan says. “Our study shows that you don’t need advanced training to appreciate how powerful tools like NMR work and how those tools are used in research.”

All materials, tutorials, and data are freely available via online tutorials and a YouTube video, enabling educators to replicate or adapt the activity even in settings with limited access to NMR facilities.

Wine sleuthing at the Atlanta Science Festival

From families with K-12 students to undergraduates to adults with no prior chemistry experience, nearly 130 visitors explored wine chemistry at the Georgia Tech NMR Center during the Atlanta Science Festival event. With McShan’s guidance, they identified and quantified more than 70 chemical components that influence wine taste, aroma, and quality by analyzing the chemical composition, structure, and dynamics of molecules.

Taking on the role of wine investigators (a real-world application of NMR), the group investigated examples of wine fraud, learning to identify harmful additives like methanol, antifreeze, and lead acetate – additives that played roles in both historical and modern wine scandals.

“By connecting the science to something familiar like wine, we were able to spark curiosity and excitement across age groups,” says McShan. “This a framework for how complex analytical techniques can be made inclusive, interactive, and inspiring whether in the classroom or at a science festival.”

Science for all

The study underscores the potential of NMR and other powerful technologies as outreach opportunities – from engaging the public to better teaching undergraduate students.

“After the event, adults said they learned how chemical composition affects wine characteristics and how NMR is used in research and industry,” McShan says. “Younger participants learned key concepts about wine composition and found benefits from the sensory elements, like watching the spectrometer in action.”

They aim to use these takeaways to continue developing outreach tools. “My end goal is to develop NMR into a practical teaching tool by grounding the technique in real-world examples,” adds McShan. “Using this approach is a clear avenue to introducing the general public to the world-class instruments used by researchers at Georgia Tech and exposing undergraduate students to the powerful analytical techniques they are likely to encounter throughout their careers.”

Funding: National Science Foundation

Newswise — The Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) hosted its Annual General Meeting (AGM) on October 15, 2025, gathering Senior Fellows from across the globe to mark the Institute’s 10^th anniversary and engage in discussions centered on strategic advancements in research and international collaboration. Under the leadership of Chairman Professor Serge Haroche, the meeting commenced with a heart-warming welcome to the new appointed HKIAS Senior Fellows: Professor Françoise Combes, Professor Étienne Ghys, Professor Dame Madeleine Atkins, Professor Alessio Figalli and Professor Sylvie Méléard. The Executive Director, Professor Shuk Han Cheng, presented a comprehensive review of the recent initiatives undertaken by City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) and HKIAS, highlighting current news, activities, collaborative interactions with faculty members between CityUHK and the home institutions of our Senior Fellows and the significant achievements of Senior Fellows to underscore a decade of excellence.

As a key component of the HKIAS 10^th anniversary celebration activities, HKIAS organised a series of distinguished lectures and round table discussion. These activities, which showcased the cutting-edge research contributions of our Senior Fellows across multitude of disciplines, were supported partially by the Kwang Hua Educational Foundation. Their reception among students and faculty at CityUHK and various academic institutions across Hong Kong highlighted a profound interest and active engagement within the academic community. 

13 October: Professor Serge Haroche, an esteemed Nobel laureate in Physics, unveiled the intricacies of laser and quantum physics. On the same day, Professor Pierre-Louis Lions, the 1994 recipient of the Fields Medal, engaged the audience with a discourse on the intersection of mathematics and artificial intelligence (AI).

14 October: Professor George Fu Gao, a world-renowned virologist, delivered an insightful lecture on AI-empowered vaccine and antibody development. Additionally, Professor Mu-ming Poo, a distinguished figure in neuroscience and brain-inspired technology illuminated the audience on brain science and its implications for AI development.

15 October: Professor Dame Madeleine Atkins, President Emeritus of Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge, led a Round Table Discussion on Additional Models of Research Grant Funding, with Mr David Foster, Executive Director of the Croucher Foundation, as the online guest speaker.

Throughout the AGM week, interdisciplinary meetings and networking events were integral to fostering mentorship opportunities and collaboration among HKIAS Senior Fellows, CityU Faculty members, emerging researchers and students from various disciplines.

These events reaffirmed HKIAS’s unwavering commitment to fostering global collaboration and scientific excellence over the past decade. As the Institute celebrated its 10^th anniversary, we look forward to organizing further initiatives that will enhance the international profile of the science and engineering community at CityUHK and explore new frontiers in research and collaboration.

For more details on the celebration events, please visit HKIAS past events.

Newswise — UPTON, N.Y. — Just after 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, final beams of oxygen ions — oxygen atoms stripped of their electrons — circulated through the twin 2.4-mile-circumference rings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and crashed into one another at nearly the speed of light inside the collider’s two house-sized particle detectors, STAR and sPHENIX. RHIC, a nuclear physics research facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been smashing atoms since the summer of 2000. The final collisions cap a quarter century of remarkable experiments using 10 different atomic species colliding over a wide range of energies in different configurations. The RHIC program has produced groundbreaking discoveries about the building blocks of matter and the nature of proton spin and technological advances in accelerators, detectors, and computing that have far surpassed scientists’ expectations when this discovery machine first turned on.

“RHIC has been one of the most successful user facilities operated by the DOE Office of Science, serving thousands of scientists from across the nation and around the globe,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “Supporting these one-of-a-kind research facilities pushes the limits of technology and expands our understanding of our world through transformational science — central pillars of DOE’s mission to ensure America’s security and prosperity.”

Gil was in the Main Control Room of Brookhaven Lab’s collider complex to officially end the 25th and final run at RHIC in advance of announcing the next major milestone in the construction of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a state-of-the-art nuclear physics research facility that will be built by reusing major components of RHIC.

“It’s been an amazing run,” said Wolfram Fischer, chair of Brookhaven Lab’s Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD), speaking of the entirety of the RHIC program. As head of C-AD, Fischer is responsible for the day-to-day, year-to-year operations of the collider and all its ancillary accelerator infrastructure. “Experiencing the challenges of first trying to get beams to circulate during commissioning in the fall of 1999, one could not have dreamed how far the performance of this machine would come,” he said. “We’ve pushed well beyond the original design in terms of the number of collisions we can produce, the energy range of those collisions, the variety of ions we’ve collided, and our ability to align the spins of protons and maintain a high degree of this alignment or polarization.”

The 25th and final run produced the largest-ever dataset from RHIC’s most energetic head-on smashups between two beams of gold ions, among the heaviest ions collided at RHIC. It also yielded a treasure trove of proton-proton collisions that will provide essential comparison data and insight into proton spin, a set of low-energy fixed target collisions to complete RHIC’s “beam energy scan,” and a final burst of oxygen-oxygen interactions. All this data will add to that collected previously by RHIC’s detectors — STAR, which has been running with many upgrades since RHIC’s beginning; PHENIX, another original RHIC detector that ceased operations in 2016; PHOBOS and BRAHMS, two smaller original detectors that ran from 2000 through 2005 and 2006, respectively; and sPHENIX, RHIC’s newest most rapid-fire collision “camera,” which came online in 2023.

This final run generated the primary data set for the new sPHENIX experiment. This year, sPHENIX accumulated more than 200 petabytes of raw data — or 200 quadrillion bytes — more than all previous RHIC raw datasets combined. This massive dataset includes 40 billion snapshots of the unique form of matter generated in gold-ion collisions.

Collectively, the RHIC measurements will fill in missing details in physicists’ understanding of how a soup of fundamental particles known as quarks and gluons — which last existed in nature some 14 billion years ago, a microsecond after the Big Bang — coalesced and converged to form the more ordinary atomic particles that make up everything visible in our world today. Recreating this primordial matter, known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), was the primary reason for building RHIC. RHIC’s energetic collisions of heavy ions such as gold were designed to set quarks and gluons free from “confinement” within protons and neutrons by melting the boundaries of these nuclear particles.

Thanks to considerable contributions from Japan’s RIKEN institute, RHIC was also built with unique capabilities for polarizing protons so that physicists could explore the origins of proton spin. This intrinsic quantum property, somewhat analogous to a planet spinning on its axis, has been leveraged to develop powerful technologies like nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and medical MRIs. RHIC’s polarized proton collisions have opened a new window into the mystery of how spin arises from the proton’s quarks and gluons.

PHENIX and STAR have both collected and published results from large swaths of spin-polarized collisions using selection “triggers” to decide which events to capture and study. During Run 25, sPHENIX became the world’s first detector to record a continuous streaming dataset from RHIC’s spin-polarized proton collisions — thus eliminating the need for triggers and potentially paving the way for unanticipated discoveries.

“This final RHIC run, with its impressive dataset, is a capstone that exemplifies the success of the entire RHIC program,” said John Hill, interim director of Brookhaven Lab. “The scientists, engineers, and technicians at Brookhaven deserve huge credit for their dedication and innovation throughout the operating life of RHIC — and for continually finding new ways to maximize the scientific output of this remarkable machine. We are also extremely grateful for the continued support of the U.S. Department of Energy, and for our collaborators from other DOE labs, U.S. universities, and scientific institutions around the globe. This exploration of the matter that makes up our world and of how it came to be has been, and will continue to be, a truly international endeavor.”

Captivating discoveries

In early 2001, as the earliest RHIC data came out, some scientists were convinced that they’d seen signs of the post-Big-Bang QGP. But the data also presented puzzling surprises. Instead of the predicted uniformly expanding gas of quarks and gluons, the matter created in RHIC’s collisions seemed to flow more like a liquid — and, remarkably, one with extremely low viscosity. Additional experiments and a careful multiyear analysis led the four original RHIC collaborations to conclude in 2005 that RHIC was generating a nearly “perfect” liquid. By 2010, they had sufficient evidence to declare this liquid hot enough to be the long-sought QGP.

Since then, RHIC physicists have been making precision measurements of the QGP, including its temperature at different stages, how it swirls — it’s the swirliest matter ever! — how quarks and gluons in the primordial soup transition under various conditions of temperature and pressure to the nuclear matter that makes up atoms in our world, and how collisions of even small particles can create tiny drops of the QGP. They’ve explored exotic forms of nuclear matter such as that found in neutron stars, detected traces of the heaviest exotic antimatter ever created in a laboratory, and explored how visible matter emerges from the “nothingness” of empty space. The sPHENIX experiment has only recently published its first physics results, laying the foundation for its future of scientific insights.

“RHIC transformed nuclear physics by demonstrating the remarkable consequences of ‘boiling the vacuum,’ to paraphrase renowned physicist T. D. Lee’s description of matter governed by quantum chromodynamics (QCD),” said Brookhaven Lab theorist Raju Venugopalan. “In QCD — the theory that describes quarks and gluons and their interactions — findings from RHIC propelled the rapid development of new analytical approaches and high-performance computing. The RHIC data also sparked several unanticipated connections between the behavior of the QGP fluid and strongly correlated condensed matter systems, including ultra-cold atoms, as well as links to concepts such as quantum entanglement and the formation and evaporation of black holes.”

Advances in nuclear physics theory and the enormous RHIC datasets have also pushed the evolution of supercomputers, AI methods for analyzing “big data,” and the infrastructure needed to store and share data seamlessly with RHIC collaborators around the world. In 2024, Brookhaven’s data center — which also houses data from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and other experiments — passed the milestone of storing 300 petabytes of data, the largest compilation of nuclear and particle physics data in the U.S. With the newest data from RHIC and ATLAS, the total now tops 610 petabytes.

In the proton spin program, RHIC’s measurements greatly improved the precision with which scientists could determine gluons’ contribution to proton spin, along with the contribution from quarks. This effort was motivated by surprising results from experiments elsewhere in the 1980s showing that quarks contribute only a fraction to this quantum property. Gluons were initially assumed to contribute the rest. RHIC’s measurements reveal that gluons contribute about as much as the quarks — not enough to fully solve the “spin puzzle.” A more recent analysis established that at least some of the gluons are spin aligned with the spin of the proton they are in. But there is still more to explore in this spin puzzle.

“Spin is one of the fundamental quantum numbers of every elementary particle in the universe except one, the Higgs,” said Elke Aschenauer, a Brookhaven Lab physicist who has played a pivotal role in RHIC’s spin physics program. “RHIC’s measurements have established the groundwork for understanding the complexity of proton spin. The future EIC will be a precision machine for studying proton spin.”

All Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider data is stored on tape at Brookhaven Lab’s data center. When physicists want access to a particular dataset — or multiple sets simultaneously — a robot grabs the appropriate tape(s) and mounts the desired data to disk within seconds. Collaborators around the world can tap into the data as if it were on their own desktop. (David Rahner/Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Continuing legacy

Even with so many impressive discoveries in the books, RHIC physicists say there will be many more to come for at least another decade.

“The science mission of RHIC will continue until we analyze all the data and publish all the papers,” said Abhay Deshpande, Brookhaven Lab’s associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics. He emphasized how important it will be to preserve RHIC’s data for future scientific analyses.

RHIC’s data will also continue to serve as an essential bridge between ongoing and planned experiments exploring nuclear matter at lower collision energies — for example at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) being built in Germany and the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN — and at much higher energies at CERN’s LHC.

“Analyzing the latest RHIC data will also help train the next generation of physicists needed to run and analyze data from future experiments,” said Lijuan Ruan, a Brookhaven Lab physicist and co-spokesperson for the STAR Collaboration.    

A big part of that future will take place right here at Brookhaven National Laboratory where major components of the RHIC accelerator complex will live on in a new nuclear physics research facility, the world’s only polarized Electron-Ion Collider. Engineers and technicians will remove one of RHIC’s ion storage rings and replace it with a new ring for storing accelerated electrons inside the existing accelerator tunnel. Meanwhile, the other RHIC ring, refurbished for its new mission, will receive ions accelerated by C-AD’s existing injector complex, traveling around the tunnel in the opposite direction from the electrons. Scientists will leverage the experience gained during 25 years of RHIC operations — as well as reams of RHIC accelerator physics data — to develop and train new AI algorithms designed to optimize EIC accelerator performance.  

When electrons collide with ions where the two EIC rings cross, the action will be captured by a brand-new particle detector. Instead of recreating the early universe, these microscope-like interactions will enable precision measurements that reveal how quarks and gluons are organized and interact within matter as we know it in today’s world.

“We’ll learn how quarks and gluons generate mass, how their interactions contribute to proton spin, and much more that will revolutionize our understanding of matter — much as the science we’ve explored at RHIC has,” said Deshpande, who also serves as director of science for the EIC. “This is the future of Brookhaven Lab and nuclear physics in the U.S.”

Daniel Marx, one of the accelerator physicists working on the design of the EIC’s new electron storage ring, said, “It’s going to be very challenging, but also exciting. We’ll be doing things that have never been done before.”

Perhaps Marx was echoing the sentiments of the physicists who originally built RHIC, demonstrating another big part of RHIC’s legacy: an ongoing willingness to tackle unprecedented scientific and technological challenges.

“We are confident that we have the people who will make the EIC happen because of the expertise we have developed by building and running RHIC,” Deshpande said.

RHIC and the future EIC are funded primarily by the DOE Office of Science.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

Follow @BrookhavenLab on social media. Find us on Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Facebook.

Related Links

Newswise — West Virginia University empowered budding innovator Don Brodie to succeed by nurturing his passion for science and sense of curiosity. More than 50 years later, Brodie and his wife, Linda, are enriching academics, research and more to help future generations excel with a $5 million gift to strengthen leadership at the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.

The couple’s gift, made through their family foundation, establishes the Linda and Don Brodie Deanship at the WVU Eberly College. The associated endowment provides broad support to advance the mission of the University’s largest academic unit, which serves more than 5,000 students across over 60 undergraduate and graduate programs. 

“From literature and the humanities to mathematics, natural sciences, and social and behavioral sciences, the reach of the WVU Eberly College is wide,” WVU President Michael T. Benson said. “This gift is an investment in the future of the University’s largest College, which serves as a launch point for students of all interests and majors, and we thank Linda and Don Brodie for their incredible show of support for WVU.”

The Brodie gift comes as WVU seeks a new leader to guide the Eberly College. Longtime Dean Gregory Dunaway will conclude 10 years at the College’s helm on June 30, although he will remain a faculty member.

Greenwood Asher & Associates is leading the national search for the next Eberly College dean.

“Education is the most powerful investment we can make in the future,” Don and Linda Brodie said. “Our hope is that this deanship strengthens leadership, inspires discovery and opens doors for students to reach their full potential.”

Eberly programs span diverse disciplines including chemistry, which sparked Don’s scientific interest.

A native of Philadelphia, Brodie was drawn to WVU by affordable out-of-state tuition and initially chose chemistry because the registration line was short. He said he appreciates the education he received from his professors, who encouraged his innovative mind and laid the groundwork for a career rooted in chemistry. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 1969.

Brodie worked as a chemist and sales associate in the Philadelphia area through the 1970s. After he met and married Linda, they were inspired by their entrepreneurial parents to start a business.

With Linda’s support, Don partnered with his brother, Steve, to launch the Purolite Company from the couple’s basement in 1981. Over the next 40 years, the family-owned business grew into a global manufacturer of pharmaceutical and bioprocessing production products, industrial water treatment, chemical and refining for food processing, metals extraction, finishing and electroplating, and products used for nuclear power generation.

Brodie’s leadership as co-founder of Purolite contributed to the development of cost-effective ways to manufacture products for a cleaner environment, as well as groundbreaking innovations in medical treatment.

Linda Brodie played a pivotal role during Purolite’s formative years, applying her experience managing a law firm to lay the foundation for administration and finance operations. As the company grew, she continued to provide critical support, guidance and leadership.

The Brodies have amplified their impact in recent years through philanthropy. They established the Don and Linda Brodie Family Foundation to support the communities in which they live and create opportunities through education. Their giving is driven by their Jewish faith and shared values, anchored by strong beliefs in tradition, responsibility and integrity.

Their generous support for WVU includes two funds established within the Eberly College to support chemistry students and faculty pursuing research and discovery with the potential for commercialization.

“The Eberly College has been so fortunate to benefit from the generosity of Linda and Don Brodie,” Dunaway said. “They have made so many investments in the College to ensure opportunity and success for our students and faculty. This extraordinary gift reflects Don and Linda’s deep belief in Eberly and their desire to help the College thrive well into the future. It strengthens the foundation of the Eberly community to reach new heights in academic excellence, innovation and opportunities for those inside and outside of WVU.”

Don Brodie has also shared his time with WVU, serving as chair of the Eberly Advisory Committee and assisting with development efforts. He was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Alumni in 2012 and selected last year to receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the Eberly College.

Don and Linda reside in Boca Raton, Florida. They are deeply devoted to their family, including their three adult children and five grandchildren.

The Brodie gift was made through the WVU Foundation, the nonprofit organization that receives and administers private donations on behalf of the University.