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Introduction"Nuclear science is a key component of the nation's research portfolio providing fundamental insights into the nature of matter and nurturing applications critical to the nation's health, security, and economic vitality. It is a field with tremendous breadth that has direct relevance to understanding the evolution of matter in the universe. Nuclear scientists today use sophisticated experimental and theoretical tools to probe the properties of nuclei and nuclear matter and of their ultimate constituents quarks and gluons. At the same time, nuclear science is probing key interdisciplinary questions: the basis of fundamental symmetries in nature, how matter emerged in the first moments of the universe, the nature of supernovae, and the origin of elements in the cosmos. Nuclear science continues to have significant impact on other fields. The field is also a prolific source of today's technological work force. More than half of nuclear science Ph.D.s apply their training outside their field notably, in medicine, industry, and national defense." (Excerpt from Executive Summary, DOE-NSF Nuclear Science Advisory Committee Long Range Plan, April 2002)
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Experimental Nuclear Structure Physics  Experimental studies are carried out with accelerators at Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, and Argonne National Laboratories. Research areas include nuclei far from stability, and in-beam gamma spectroscopy to high spin states (J=20-50). The recoil mass spectrometer at Oak Ridge coupled with radioactive beams provides new neutron-rich nuclei presently inaccessible.
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Experimental Relativistic Heavy-Ion Physics  The new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven is used to search for the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter in which the universe is believed to have existed a few microseconds after the big bang. The PHENIX detector at RHIC is used to detect hadrons, photons, electrons, and muons which are expected to form the signatures of the production of a system of deconfined quarks.
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Theoretical / Computational Nuclear Physics  The goal of nuclear theory is to describe nuclei and their reactions in terms of the basic constituents of matter and the fundamental interactions between them. Our two main research areas are: (a) Computational nuclear structure physics (quantum many-particle theory in HFB mean field approximation) to describe nuclei far from stability and properties relevant to nuclear astrophysics, and (b) Electromagnetic interactions with nuclei (models of the quark/gluon structure of the nucleons and light baryons), and phenomenology of neutrino masses and mixing angles.
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2007 Vanderbilt University
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