Yang-Ting Chien, professor of physics at Georgia State University, has received a highly-competitive Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Chien, who will receive a five-year, $750,000 award, is one of 83 recipients from across the U.S. selected by a panel of scientific experts to receive funding. The program supports early career researchers at U.S. universities or DOE national laboratories.
“Supporting America’s scientists and researchers early in their careers will ensure the U.S. remains at the forefront of scientific discovery and develops the solutions to our most pressing challenges,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said in a prepared statement.
A theoretical nuclear and particle physicist, Chien’s special interest lies in understanding the contents of an atom’s nucleus, and the forces—known as the strong interaction—that bind those contents together.
Chien and his colleagues work with data collected from high-energy particle colliders including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, N.Y., and the Large Hadron Collider at the European Council for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Once built, they also plan to use the Electron-Ion Collider at BNL.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider consists of enclosed tunnels that run in a circle—like a hula hoop—with a circumference of more than two miles. At two locations along the circle sit detectors, which collect data that Chien uses to reconstruct the makings of a nucleus. Two gold ions—electrically charged atoms—are spun in opposite directions around the hoop until, at nearly the speed of light, they collide into one another directly at the center of a detector.
“It is like you’re shooting a needle from America to Africa and hit a piece of hair,” Chien said. “You need that precision. It’s almost like a science fiction experiment. And our excellent experimental colleagues make it happen.”
As the ions collide, a fireball of material called quark-gluon plasma forms and streams of particles, known as jets, are sent flying away from the collision. The detectors collect information from the fireball and jets, including which types of particles are present and how fast they are moving.
Like the way in which investigators can reconstruct a car accident by studying the remnants of a collision, Chien uses data collected by the detector to reconstruct the contents of the nuclei.
“Using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning techniques designed to extract features from this final state data, I try to link that to what’s happening at the collision,” said Chien.
By exploring the contents and forces found within the nucleus, he is laying vital groundwork for future work in nuclear physics research.
“This sector still needs a lot of work,” said Chen. “Understanding the structure of the nucleus is a crucial step.”
Original source can be found here.
