Research Spotlight

Claire Hypolite is an Institute of Technology alumni who is involved in a new program, PACES (Parents And Children Enjoying Science) designed to get families doing science and thinking critically together.

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment at CERN recently reached an important milestone, the insertion of "the tracker" into the core of the detector. The tracker measures the positions of the particles into the collider ring. Professor Jeremiah Mans of the School of Physics and Astronomy is a member of the large collaboration CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) that will take measurements on the upcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Professor Cindy Cattell of the School of Physics and Astronomy is part of the NASA STEREO Waves collaboration. STEREO consists of two space-based observatories - one ahead, "A" of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind,"B".

Professor Keith Olive’s research provides a unique probe into the very early history of the Universe. Olive is a theorist who specializes in high energy particle physics and cosmology. “High Energy” particles are those produced in high-energy situations such as accelerators or the Big Bang.

Professor Prisca Cushman is looking for WIMPS, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, as a collaborator on the Cryogenic Dark matter Search (CDMS), which is located in the Soudan Mine in Northern Minnesota.

School of Physics and Astronomy Professor Bob Pepin and colleagues has published a report in the current issue of Science Magazine that will help shed light on the early solar system. Pepin and his co-authors studied small amounts of of cometary matter from the Comet 81P/Wild-2, which was intercepted by the space probe Stardust in January 2004.

Professor Mikhail Shifman, a theoretical high energy physicist, began his career on the eve of a big developments in high energy physics, the discovery of the J/ψ particle (charmonium) in 1974. “It was such an exciting time, he recalls. People would not sleep. Every day, new papers were coming out, new advances being made.” Shifman said that it was a great time to be a young theorist. He is betting that he will be able to book-end his career with another great era in particle theory.

Vincent Noireaux is a new assistant professor in the area of experimental Biological Physics. Professor Noireaux’s research is centered around genetic information, in vitro synthetic gene networks and artificial “proto cells” which are able to express DNA.

Shaul Hanany’s observational cosmology group is building a balloon-borne instrument that will search for signatures of the Big Bang. Cosmologists posit that shortly after the Big Bang, as short as 10-35 seconds after the Bang, the Universe underwent a period of immense inflation during which its size inflated trillions fold.

School of Physics and Astronomy Professor John Wygant has been made Principal Investigator of a large NASA investigation to measure intense electric fields in the Earth's radiation belts. This project is part of a two spacecraft mission called the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, which will study energetic charged particle acceleration in the Earth's magnetosphere during major geomagnetic storms.