Newswise — When astronomers point their telescopes to the heavens, they tend to look toward the light. They may search for the pin pricks of shining stars, the billowing of cold gas clouds, the faint heat of a star nursery or the rhythmic blaze of a pulsar. These faint signals of light beckon in a universe that is mostly dark.

In fact, the visible bits only account for 5% of the universe, while the dark side makes up the other 95%.

Now, an ongoing experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is aiming a spotlight into this so-called hidden dark sector. It aims to uncover hints of particles that interact with the dark by catching their light. 

“You underestimate the power of the dark side.”

Most of our universe is currently thought to be composed of dark matter and dark energy. While the dark sector isn’t visible to light microscopes, its existence is inferred by how it affects the stars and galaxies we study.

Currently, it’s thought that fully 27% of our universe is dark matter. This is matter that, as far as we know, isn’t made of the ordinary particles found in the Standard Model, the theoretical framework that nuclear physicists use to describe the subatomic particles that build our visible universe, such as protons and neutrons.

According to Liping Gan, the Jefferson Lab Eta Factory (JEF) experiment aims to capture hints of particles that connect the light and dark sides. Gan is a professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and a spokesperson for the JEF experiment. She says one of the goals of the experiment is to produce and capture hints of dark matter particles.

“One of the first ones is to search for dark gauge bosons. And that will give us some clue about the properties of the dark sector,” she said. 

If they do exist, dark gauge bosons would be rare examples of particles that can interact with the ordinary particles described in the Standard Model, as well as the mysterious dark matter particles.

To search for these bosons, ironically, the physicists will be looking for faint signals of light. 

“There’s no such thing as ‘the unknown’, only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.”

The experiment will be carried out with the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility accessed by more than 1,700 nuclear physicists worldwide to study the nature of matter.

The original GlueX Forward Calorimeter, as installed in Jefferson Lab’s Experimental Hall D. (Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab)

In the experiment, the CEBAF accelerator will generate a beam of energetic electrons and direct them into a diamond crystal. There, the electrons stimulate the diamond to release highly energetic light particles, or photons. These tiny but mighty particles of light then barrel into a target made of hydrogen. 

Hydrogen atoms are the simplest element to explore: a single proton makes up the atom’s nucleus, while the motion of a single electron forms the atom’s outer perimeter. The interactions of those photons with hydrogen’s protons spawn additional particles that will then enter detectors, where many of them can be measured.

JEF experimenters are most interested in producing the eta (η) meson. Like the proton, the η meson is made of a combination of smaller particles called quarks and gluons. But unlike the proton, the η isn’t stable. Instead, it will fall apart, or decay, into other particles in about half of an attosecond (5×10-19 seconds).

“Then our goal becomes looking for a decay. There are very many different decay channels we are going to measure, because a different decay channel tells us a different part of the physics,” explained Gan. 

According to Simon Taylor, a Jefferson Lab staff scientist and spokesperson for the JEF experiment, the experimenters are looking for rare decays.

“And a particular rare decay that we’ve been focusing on is a four-photon final state,” he said. 

“Only 18 out of 10,000 will decay to this. Most of the etas will decay into two gammas. So that’s why we call it rare reaction or rare decays, it happens only for a small fraction of the experiment,” Gan said.

The most interesting decay channels in this experiment are when η may produce a dark gauge boson. Dark gauge bosons are thought to be both exceedingly rare and short-lived. They, too, will decay away into other particles in the tiniest of fractions of a second. 

“These other particles include photons of light. We don’t know if these dark gauge bosons exist or will be produced in these decays, but this decay mode will allow us to search for them,” said Taylor.

The researchers will sift through the data they collect to see if they can discover unexpected peaks in their data, where there are more four-photon groupings than they expect. This will trigger intensive analysis to determine if each of these “bumps” is a tell-tale sign of the η meson decay.

Justin Stevens is the Wilson & Martha Claiborne Stephens associate professor of physics at William & Mary and spokesperson for phase two of the Gluonic Excitations Experiment (GlueX-II). The JEF and GlueX-II experiments are running concurrently using the same apparatus. He explained that one of the biggest challenges the two experiments face is finding those tell-tale bumps of interest inside the ginormous amount of data that will be generated. 

For context, 50 million light photons slam into the hydrogen target every second during the run. Each one has the potential to generate a few to dozens of particles that will stream into the detectors, all at once.

“We are getting something like 5 to 10 times higher luminosity in total compared to the original phase of GlueX,” Stevens said.

Taylor said that there are also other issues that will make finding a rare bump a challenge.

“It can get confused with other reactions,” Taylor explained. “Photons are detected by reconstructing the electromagnetic showers they produce in a calorimeter.  Some tiny fraction of the time, one or more of the photons disappear down the beam line or in a hole in the detector. Or two very close showers of particles may merge in the calorimeter together.”

To ensure the researchers would be able to capture these rare reactions, they needed to optimize one of their main detectors. An upgrade would ensure the detector can measure the photons it catches to such accuracy, the physicists could be sure they are capturing signals from a potential dark gauge boson and not from the remnants of incoming photons or from other reactions.

“You can’t stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere.”

For this experiment, the JEF collaboration upgraded the existing GlueX Forward Calorimeter (FCAL) to improve its resolution and hardiness. 

A view of the FCAL system during the upgrade. (Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab)

FCAL originally consisted of 2,800 lead glass scintillating modules connected to photomultiplier tubes. Each module has a 4 cm square face to collect the incoming particles produced in the experiment. These modules were designed to capture incoming particles and convert them into showers of light as the particles travel down their 45 cm length. This light can then be measured by the photomultiplier tubes and converted into signals that are recorded as data.

The upgrade removed 440 of the lead glass modules at the center of the detector and replaced them with 1,596 smaller lead tungstate (PbWO4) crystals. The new crystals feature only a 2 cm square face and extend 20 cm in length. They form a central square inside the new Eta Calorimeter (ECAL) that is surrounded by 2,360 of the original lead glass modules. 

A lead glass scintillating module (left) with a lead tungstate (PbWO4) crystal (right) are shown here inside Experimental Hall D. (Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab)

Zisis Papandreou is a JEF experiment spokesperson and a professor and head of the physics department at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan Canada. He compared the upgraded detector to a digital camera.

“Essentially, we’re reconstructing something akin to an image. If you have a larger number of smaller pixels, you can improve the resolution in the image,” he said.

The new lead tungstate crystals are also radiation-hard, which means they can better withstand the onslaught of particles generated in experiments than the original lead glass modules. Centering the new crystal modules closest to the target allows them to take the brunt of the onslaught, protecting the lead glass modules from the highest-energy particles and resulting in a longer overall detector lifetime.

Funded by the lab, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, the upgrade of FCAL to ECAL cost about $5 million. Several work groups at the lab also contributed to the upgrade, including the Radiation Detector & Imaging group, the Detector Support group, the Radiation Control Department, and the Fast Electronics group. 

After four years of R&D, the full-scale upgrade took about three years to complete, beginning in 2022 and wrapping up in early 2025. According to Alexander Somov, a staff scientist at Jefferson Lab and a spokesperson for the JEF experiment who led the ECAL construction, the detector has already proven its versatility.

“It is the largest lead-tungstate crystal calorimeter in the U.S., and it’s been successfully commissioned and integrated,” said Somov. “It took a few weeks to commission, and all modules are operational. It was working fine for the first run of approximately five months.”

ECAL was successfully commissioned in April 2025, with data acquired for JEF and GlueX-II in late spring and summer 2025. So far, the detector has collected about 75 days of data as counted by the Program Advisory Committee for the two experiments.

“And the first results we’re getting show that the performance of ECAL is in good agreement with our basic expectations. But there’s more analysis to come,” said Somov.

University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) Physics Professor Liping Gan, George Washington University undergraduate student Olivia Nippe-Jeakins, UNCW undergraduate students Shane Whaley and Ben Simpson, Jefferson Lab Hall D Staff Scientist Alexander “Sasha” Somov, and UNCW postdoc Laveen Puthiya Veetil pose for a photo inside Jefferson Lab’s Experimental Hall D. (Aileen Devlin | Jefferson Lab)

The upgraded detector has also served as a training ground for undergraduate physics majors interested in pursuing a career in nuclear physics. In all, 28 undergraduate students from the JEF experiment’s 11 collaborating universities participated in ECAL fabrication, installation and commissioning. The project also involved three graduate students, six postdoctoral nuclear physicists and one visiting scientist. 

“These are valuable experiences to undergraduates and then later on, they go to graduate school and some of them already were talking about going to a university that has GlueX collaborators. So, the hardware work is an absolutely amazing experience for students,” said Papandreou.

“You built a time machine? Out of a DeLorean?”

The second and final run for these experiments is currently scheduled to resume this summer. In it, the collaborators also aim to collect data that may reveal new clues to our understanding of other phenomena, such as why matter beat out antimatter in the first second of the early universe.

George Washington University undergraduate Quinn Stefan, left, and graduate student Phoebe Sharp, right, monitor experiment progress inside the Experimental Hall D counting house at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Va., on June 17, 2025. (Aileen Devlin | Jefferson Lab)

“For example, right now we see large asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe, and one of the goals is to search for maybe there’s some new symmetry violation beyond the Standard Model. The third goal is to understand why quantum chromodynamics (QCD) prevents quarks from being isolated via tests of fundamental symmetries at low energy,” Somov said.

Alongside these searches, the GlueX-II experiment collaborators are looking to expand their data on particles that include charm quarks, such as the J/ψ (J/psi) meson. While the more familiar protons and neutrons are made of up and down quarks, other subatomic particles include other quark flavors, such as the charm quark. These data offer a rare opportunity to look at in depth at how such particles are made.

“So that means we can do things like study J/ψ production with a lot higher statistics and look for the charm production mechanism with a lot more precision than we had before,” said Stevens.

As the collaborators prepare for their final data run, they have also already begun preparing for the next opportunity. The proposed GlueX-III run aims to increase the intensity of the photon beam. For GlueX, it achieved about 10 million photons per second, and GlueX-II has an intensity of about 50 million photons per second. The goal for GlueX-III is to slowly crank that up to around one hundred million photons per second.

“Once you understand the detector, you just drive up the rate,” Stevens said. “So, we’re going to keep pushing up the intensity as high as we can, because we just get more data. You can look at more rare decays, more rare processes.”

In the meantime, the collaborators have their hands full preparing for their next run this summer and are looking forward to what their data reveal about the light and dark sides of our universe.

Further Reading
GWU Research Magazine: The Particle Whisperers
UNCW: Undergraduates Step Into Physics Research
Technical Paper: Eta Decays with Emphasis on Rare Neutral Modes: The JLab Eta Factory (JEF) Experiment
Technical Paper: Update to the JEF proposal (PR12-14-004)
Technical Paper: Light monitoring system for the lead tungstate calorimeter in Hall D at Jefferson Lab

Journal Link: Physical Review Letters, 135 091401 (2025)

Newswise — In the air people breathe, the water on the Earth, the stars in the sky and more, atoms are the building blocks that make up the universe. Understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus is crucial for research with implications for astrophysics and in applications such as medical imaging and data storage.

A new study conducted by Department of Physics researchers using the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory at Florida State University examined titanium-50 nuclei and showed that a long‑standing explanation for where magnetism in atomic nuclei comes from does not fully work for titanium‑50. The research, which was published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that scientists may need to rethink how they explain nuclear magnetism.

“What current models propose is that magnetic strength is largely generated by spin-flip excitations, that means when flipping proton or neutron spins from up to down between so-called spin-orbit partner orbitals,” said Associate Professor Mark Spieker, a co-author on the multi-institution study. “For the first time, we showed that this type of spin-flip cannot be the only mechanism that generates nuclear magnetism.”

How it works

Current nuclear models treat protons and neutrons as individual particles that can occupy fixed energy levels. A spin-flip occurs when these particles change the orientation of their spin as they jump between levels, generating magnetic strength in the process. For many years, scientists believed that this spin-flip mechanism was mainly responsible for magnetic strengths, or signals, in atomic nuclei. Advanced computer modeling also predicted this behavior.

The FSU experiments showed something unexpected: nuclear excited states that clearly showed this neutron spin-flip structure were not the ones producing the strongest magnetic signals. In other words, having more of this neutron “spin‑flip” structure did not automatically mean a stronger magnetic effect.

What they did

The researchers conducted a neutron-transfer experiment at the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory, using the facility’s Tandem Van de Graaff Accelerator to direct a deuteron — a nucleus made of a proton and a neutron — beam at a thin foil of titanium-49. During the reaction, the neutron from the beam was transferred to titanium-49, producing titanium-50 and leaving a residual proton.

Scientists used the Super-Enge Split-Pole Spectrograph at the Fox Lab to measure the different angles at which the proton was emitted in the reaction, allowing them to analyze how the neutron was transferred to titanium-49.

“You could say that the deuteron beam hits the titanium-49, transfers a neutron, and in this process kicks it up a set of stairs. Depending on the nucleus, that set of stairs looks very different,” Spieker said. “With the spectrograph, we can measure how high the different steps are. How high we get up the set of stairs depends on the excitation energy that we give to the nucleus.”

They combined their results with previously published electron- and proton-scattering data and with data from new photon-scattering experiments conducted at collaborating universities. By combining all these approaches, they were able to closely examine how neutrons flip their spin and how much those flips contribute to the nucleus’s overall magnetic behavior.

The researchers saw that the magnetic signal observed in their experiments was not of the same strength as models predicted — a sign that something else must be contributing to the magnetic signals they measured for titanium-50.

“Without combining all these data sets, the story cannot be stitched together cleanly,” said Bryan Kelly, a graduate student at FSU and study co-author. “Seeing the other magnetic excitations, that the other probes are sensitive to, allowed us to conclude that the spin-flip mechanism between spin-orbit partners is not the sole factor of magnetic strength generation.”

Why it matters and future directions

The study’s results challenge long-standing assumptions about the magnetic behavior of nuclei. Improving scientific understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei will refine current models used across nuclear physics and astrophysics and will help to link these with models used in high-energy physics. Such combined efforts between different fields of physics lead to a better understanding of the building blocks of ordinary matter that shape our universe.

“Developing a better understanding of the universe is exciting and fascinating on its own, and as we learn more, we can possibly apply these new insights to all sorts of new ideas,” Spieker said. “All ordinary matter is made of atomic nuclei, so the more we understand these ‘building blocks’ of nature, the more possibilities we have for what we can use them for to benefit society and drive progress.”

In future studies, the researchers plan to examine what accounts for the unexplained magnetism in titanium-50.

“This research showed that we cannot rely on magnetic strength measurements alone to understand excited states of nuclei,” Kelly said. “Magnetic strength is spread out across several nuclear states and understanding why will require further investigations of the nucleus.”

Acknowledgements

Researchers from Florida State University, the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory in North Carolina at Duke University contributed to this study.

This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the German Research Foundation, the Institute of Atomic Physics in Romania, the Romanian Ministry of Research and the Romanian Government.

 

BYLINE: Michelle Alvarez

For Immediate Release_

March 23, 2026
Contact: Michelle Alvarez
malvarez@jlab.org

A Strong Case for Weak Interactions

Jefferson Lab physicist Ciprian Gal wins prestigious DOE award to search for cracks in physics’ best theory of the universe

Newswise — NEWPORT NEWS, VA – In fifth grade, Ciprian Gal received his physics textbook a year early. The book promised to explain everything, and young Gal believed it. “I was bragging to all my friends, look at this book. It tells you everything,” Gal said. “And I’m going to know everything about it.” Decades later, Gal, a staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, is still chasing answers. His work probing the fundamental forces that hold matter together earned him a DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Award. The five-year, $2.75 million award will fund personnel and research expenses related to Gal’s work on the Measurement of a Lepton-Lepton Electroweak Reaction (MOLLER) experiment. MOLLER aims to test whether the Standard Model of Particle Physics, scientists’ current best description of how particles interact, is actually complete. Measuring Weak Charge The Standard Model explains three of the four fundamental forces that govern the universe: electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Gal’s research focuses on the measurement of the electron’s weak charge, a property that describes how electrons interact through the weak force. While physicists understand the weak force reasonably well, measuring its precise effects on electrons requires extraordinary precision. The MOLLER experiment will scatter electrons off other electrons in a hydrogen target. It will measure tiny differences in how they scatter depending on the electron’s spin direction. These differences are so tiny, estimated to be 35 parts per billion, that measuring them requires utmost accuracy and control over every aspect of the experiment. “It’s a precision measurement,” Gal said. “We need to know exactly what we’re measuring, down to very fine details.” The challenge extends beyond just taking measurements. Gal and his team must account for every possible source of uncertainty, from the quantum mechanics of how particles scatter to the precise geometry of their detector. Abhay Deshpande, who mentored Gal during his graduate studies at Stony Brook University and now collaborates with him on MOLLER, attributes this precision mindset to Gal’s fundamental approach to physics. “His penchant for precision and methodical approach makes him particularly suited to this exacting research,” said Deshpande, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s associate lab director for nuclear and particle physics and Stony Brook University distinguished professor of physics. The new measurements could indicate new particles or forces that physicists haven’t discovered yet. These deviations could help answer some of physics’ biggest mysteries: Why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? What is dark matter made of? “Whether we confirm the Standard Model’s predictions or find something unexpected, this measurement will be a major step forward,” Gal said. “Either result will teach us something fundamental about how the universe works.” A Decade of Physics at Jefferson Lab Gal’s connection to Jefferson Lab began in 2014, long before he joined the staff. Immediately after earning his Ph.D., he came to the lab as a University of Virginia (UVA) postdoc, drawn by the facility’s unique capabilities for studying the internal structure of protons and neutrons. Over the next eight years, Gal worked at the lab through partnerships with UVA, Stony Brook University and Mississippi State University. Each position as a research assistant professor helped him develop his skills in precision measurements and experimental design. In 2023, he joined Jefferson Lab as a staff scientist in Experimental Halls A/C. Throughout his career, Gal worked closely with mentors who shaped his approach to physics and collaboration. “At this point, Cip is one of the leading mid-career experts on all things relevant to the MOLLER experiment,” said Krishna Kumar, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst professor of physics and MOLLER spokesperson. “As we pivot to data collection and physics analysis, I expect he will be one of the leaders of the team driving the analysis to accomplish the goals of the experiment.” For Gal, that leadership potential stems directly from his commitment to teamwork. “The research that I want to do and the things that I want to discover can’t be done without collaboration, not only with experimental and theoretical physicists here at the lab, but also at the universities,” Gal said.

Looking Forward The DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program, established in 2010, supports outstanding scientists at a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility within 12 years of having earned their doctorate degree across disciplines including nuclear physics. The program aims to support the vision, creativity and effort of early career faculty to drive innovation in the basic science enterprise. For Gal, the award provides resources and time to tackle MOLLER’s technical challenges and prepare for the experiment’s data collection phase. “Cip is a fantastic collaborator,” said Kumar. “He communicates effectively regardless of the audience, and the fact that he acknowledges the need for collaboration demonstrates his maturity and potential for leadership.” Beyond the immediate research, Gal sees the award as validation of his approach: combining precision measurement techniques with innovative detector design to push the boundaries of what physics can reveal about nature’s fundamental workings. It also validates something simpler: persistence. “I think for these very competitive awards, it matters a lot to be able to stand out, to have something that is unique on its own,” Gal said. He applied in 2024, received feedback, refined his proposal, and won on his second attempt in 2025. “Ciprian thrives on difficult tasks,” said Deshpande. “He understands not only the award’s value to his own career but, more importantly, the visibility this recognition brings to the MOLLER project and Jefferson Lab. His persistence therefore does not surprise me, and I am delighted by his success.” For researchers working at the frontier of nuclear physics, success often means spending years preparing for measurements that take only hours or days to complete. The payoff comes when those measurements reveal something unexpected, a crack in our understanding that points toward deeper truths. Gal’s work on MOLLER continues that tradition, using precision as a tool to probe whether the Standard Model tells the whole story or whether the universe has more secrets waiting to be discovered. For a scientist who once believed a single book could explain everything, the possibility of discovering something entirely new might be even better than having all the answers.

Further Reading

https://moller-docdb.physics.sunysb.edu/cgi-bin/DocDBTest/public/ShowDocument?docid=998

https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.109.024323

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10267

Contact: Michelle Alvarez, Jefferson Lab Communications Office, malvarez@jlab.org

-end-

Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. JSA is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc. (SURA).

DOE’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

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 — RICHLAND, Wash.—The Department of Energy granted early career awards to six researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory—a record number of recipients for PNNL in a single year. The prestigious award is designated for outstanding scientists early in their research careers. It delivers generous support—$2,750,000 for each of the 2025 recipients over a period of five years—allowing researchers to delve into questions that are key to DOE missions. 

“This is the first time six PNNL researchers have received Early Career Research Awards in the same year. This recognition is a testament to their promising research and the impact they stand to make in a variety of fields over the course of their careers,” said Deb Gracio, PNNL director.

PNNL recipients of the awards include chemist Richard Cox, chemical engineer Josh Elmore, computational scientist Hadi Dinpajooh, materials scientist Le Wang, and Earth scientists Avni Malhotra and Nick Ward. Their work focuses on basic science, ranging in focus from the chemistry of heavy elements like plutonium and uranium to plant and microbiological processes that could boost the development of the U.S. bioeconomy. The awards are given to scientists at DOE national laboratories, Office of Science user facilities and U.S. academic institutions. 

“The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is dedicated to supporting these promising investigators, and the Early Career Research Program provides an incredible opportunity,” said Harriet Kung, DOE’s Deputy Director of Science Programs for the Office of Science. “These awards allow them to pursue new ideas and harness the resources of the user facilities to increase the potential for breakthrough new discoveries.” 

For some, like Malhotra, the funding presents a rare opportunity to lead a new research program. “It’s an incredible opportunity to build a program from scratch that can lead to long-term discoveries and new research capabilities,” said Malhotra. Her work will shed light on biological processes that occur in soil near plant roots, which are difficult to capture and have long gone understudied. 

Similarly, Nick Ward’s research could uncover important details about a large, lingering question in the Earth science community: just how much methane and nitrous oxide could flow into or out of the world’s trees, and how might the scientific community better capture the process of forest-based trace gas exchange in their models?

For other recipients, like Wang, the funding makes possible new investigations within an established research team. Wang’s work flows out of the lab’s research in thin oxide films: materials that are an essential component of many modern electronics. Scientists like Wang grow these films in extremely thin layers, atom by atom, and study them to glean details about materials that can give rise to new, promising energy and information-processing technologies. 

“I’ve proposed to focus on a new material system known as high-entropy oxides,” said Wang. “Exploring how these multicomponent materials behave at the atomic level could bring about new functional properties,” he added. 

Dinpajooh’s work developing new AI methodologies could accelerate discovery in basic energy sciences by helping researchers better understand chemical and physical processes in electrolyte solutions. Electrolyte solutions are central to energy storage technologies, separation of critical materials, and many other applications. These AI-enabled approaches could improve prediction of key phenomena such as speciation, nucleation, and electron transfer—helping scientists tailor electrolyte performance and guide the design of next-generation materials and processes.

Other funded work, like Elmore’s research on bacterial bioproduction, could ultimately harness the power of microorganisms to produce valuable chemicals. But before those chemicals and other critical materials can be produced, researchers must work toward a predictive understanding of how microbes regulate energy use. 

By exploring how certain proteins are modified within bacterial cells, Elmore’s research could help to realize that understanding. The proposed work builds upon the project he led within PNNL’s Predictive Phenomics Initiative, which focuses largely on unraveling the mysteries of molecular function in complex biological systems.

Much of the work from this year’s recipients could deliver wide-ranging implications in diverse fields—Cox’s research into nuclear chemistry being a prime example. Cox plans to study the basic chemical behavior of a subset of heavy elements known as actinides. With key roles in nuclear energy, environmental cleanup, energy storage, and even nuclear non-proliferation, a better understanding of why actinides behave the way they do could benefit many. 

“It takes a special place like PNNL that has the access and the ability to handle these unique elements safely,” said Cox, who has pursued this line of research for roughly half a decade. “It was very exciting to find out that my proposed research was chosen, and I’m even more excited to venture out into a new scientific direction,” he added.

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About PNNL

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and 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 the DOE Office of Science website. For more information on PNNL, visit PNNL’s News Center. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Newswise — It started with a social media post from Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI. Last year, he tweeted, ​“There’s a new kind of coding I call ​‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” Karpathy said that large language models and voice-to-text programs had gotten so sophisticated that he could just ask a model to create something and then copy and paste the code it generated to build a project or create a web app from scratch. ​“I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.” 

That groovy technique might be good for patching a glitchy website or building a phone app, but can it really change the way we do science? Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are testing vibe coding tools and techniques to see how they stand up to data-intensive scientific challenges. At a recent hackathon, researchers from across the lab gathered to learn together and test commercially available coding tools like Cursor and Warp against scientific challenges as large and hairy as the hunt for dark matter and as pressing as the optimization of nuclear power plants. 

As a long-time leader in computational science and the home of Aurora, one of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers, Argonne is no stranger to grand challenges. But to solve huge problems and to process more data than ever before, researchers are working to stay at the bleeding edge of harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) for science.

Rick Stevens sees vibe coding as another way Argonne researchers can continue to speed up scientific innovation. Stevens is the associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne. He has said that scientists need to be able to work as fast as they can think. He gets frustrated by the bottlenecks of current technology. But vibe coding is a productivity hack. ​“You’re unhobbled from your coding speed,” said Stevens. 

With vibe coding, researchers can interact with large language models in real time, asking them questions by talking rather than by typing commands, and then getting usable output in seconds or minutes. Stevens compared it to having an AI co-scientist — or even a team of co-scientists — working alongside you. He challenged fellow scientists to work with the technology every day. ​“You need to get your head around how to be productive in this environment,” he said. ​“Think, play and have a blast!”

Breaking barriers between ideas and action 

Part of the excitement around vibe coding is that we don’t know how it’s going to change science. At the hackathon, the vibe in the room was playful. The group was a mix of coders and non-coders from a variety of disciplines. Instead of quietly pecking away at their keyboards, researchers were laughing, bouncing ideas off each other and confidently speaking commands to their laptops. 

The promise of AI and vibe coding isn’t just about doing science faster, Stevens explained. These tools free up scientists to be more creative, to put their energy toward things that only a human can do. ​“With these tools, you’re not bottlenecked by writing code,” he said. ​“Now, you’re focused on ideas.” 

Here are some of the ideas Argonne scientists are vibing on:

1. Prototyping software to strengthen nuclear power plants

Nuclear power plants are an integral part of America’s energy supply and a reliable source of power for the growing energy needs of AI. Nuclear engineer Yeni Li and her team are creating AI models of those power plants to help plant engineers and managers predict the best times for maintenance. That knowledge can lead to more reliable and affordable energy production. 

Li said that vibe coding will be useful for setting up the software architecture she needs to turn her ideas into prototypes. ​“These tools will help us do a few days of work in a single afternoon,” said Li. 

2. Automating workflows in bioscience

Rosemarie Wilton doesn’t do a lot of coding in her work as a molecular biologist, but she does spend a significant amount of time using software tools for data analysis. Developing Python-coded pipelines would allow her to automate her data processing workflows and integrate multiple tools seamlessly. She was delighted to see how fast vibe coding could give her the command codes she needed. ​“For a coding novice, it’s really quite amazing. It will be a time saver,” she said. 

That quick win in generating command codes led Wilton and Computational Biologist Nick Chia to think about other ways vibe coding could help. Chia mused, ​“If we have an AI agent generating hypotheses for experiments, could we create another AI agent to order the chemicals or samples needed to run those experiments?” Speeding up routine processes like these could help Wilton and her team track the spread of human pathogens with greater accuracy or engineer new enzymes and biosynthetic pathways faster than ever before. 

3. Translating coding languages in science infrastructure

Zachary Sherman is a software developer who manages open-source Python tools for the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement group. He came to the hackathon looking for ways to quickly translate other coding languages into Python, a task that could take years of tedious manual coding. 

“There are many different atmospheric tools in different coding languages and also databases with application programming interfaces for downloading and interacting with atmospheric datasets,” said Sherman. ​“Some of these tools are outdated. We think vibe coding can help us create tools in Python to interact with these interfaces to download and work with the datasets. We also think vibe coding will help us modernize these code bases so we can troubleshoot issues faster and save time and money as we maintain essential scientific infrastructure.”

4. Understanding the nature of the universe

Chiara Bissolotti is a nuclear physicist trying to understand how all known particles interact. Tim Hobbs is a theoretical particle physicist trying to identify unknown particles that can help us understand the nature of dark matter or other possible ​“new physics” in the universe. Both of their fields generate huge amounts of data from theoretical computer simulations, cosmological observations and experiments at research institutions such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and the planned Electron-Ion Collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. The information hidden where their data sets overlap could be the key to answering some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, from quarks to the cosmos. But merging those data sets is a monumental task if you’re coding and comparing them by hand. 

“Can the data sets talk to each other?” asked Hobbs. ​“Might they be hiding common patterns, or guide us toward novel theoretical predictions or the automation of burdensome calculations?” 

Bissolotti summed it up, ​“We have many, many ideas. Many more ideas than time. If vibe coding can help us build the scaffolding of the code or help us make the data comparisons more scalable and efficient, we can cut our time to solution by a huge factor.”

5. Collaborating on complex problems in national security

Jonathan Ozik is a computational scientist who uses supercomputers and simulations to understand large and complex systems across many scientific domains, such as biological systems, health care interventions and infectious diseases in urban settings. He said vibe coding can help him explain his work to the many collaborators from different backgrounds that he works with. He also sees it as a way that he can help himself switch between complex projects. ​“It could give me a two-minute reintroduction to the code and the context I’m working in,” he said. ​“There’s no reason not to try to make your daily tasks easier.” 

Ozik predicts vibe coding will open research up to ideas we can’t yet begin to imagine: ​“If you have fewer perceived barriers, you create new possibilities. Things that were previously infeasible in science will become common.”

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 — 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.

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