View the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) news feature, "" which describes the work scientists and collaborators—including nuclear physics Professors Dennis Perepelitsa, Jamie Nagle, and a team of four graduate students—are doing to build and test components for sPHENIX, a 1000-ton particle detector housed at BNL.

Also check out two BNL feature articles profiling CU Graduate Students and . Garcia and Ouellette are members of the graduate student team who are assembling sectors of the outer hadronic calorimeter for the new sPHENIX detector.

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There were 59 awards selected on peer review from 700 proposals. Professor Perepelitsa was the sole awardee from CU �鶹ӰԺ in 2017. He joins several previous DOE Early Career winners in the department: Ivan Smalyukh (2013), Paul Romatschke (2012), Minhyea Lee (2011), Michael Hermele (2010), Alysia Marino (2010), and Tobin Munsat (2010).

Data for Perepelitsa’s research is collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. At this international facility, heavy nuclei are accelerated to near the speed of light and brought into collision, creating a “quark-gluon plasma” — a miniature version of the primordial matter that comprised the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. These collisions are analyzed with the ATLAS detector, a 7000 ton, 46 meter long experiment situated underground in the LHC tunnels, with an experimental collaboration consisting of thousands of scientists around the world. Professor Perepelitsa’s research seeks to determine how high-energy particles are affected by quark-gluon plasma regions they encounter. Perepelitsa is also involved in the development of the sPHENIX experiment, a new detector being designed and built at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S.

“I am grateful for this recognition and encouragement by the broader scientific community,” Perepelitsa said. “The financial award represents a crucial investment right as I am starting to develop my research program in experimental nuclear physics at CU �鶹ӰԺ.”

“We are excited to have Assistant Professor Perepelitsa honored with a DOE Early Career Award,” Physics Department Chair John Cumalat said. “These awards recognize the excellence of young faculty who quickly become international leaders in their research field.”

Dennis Perepelitsa earned his PhD in Physics from Columbia University in 2014 and performed postdoctoral work at Brookhaven National Laboratory as a Goldhaber Distinguished Fellow. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado in August 2016. He has won multiple awards including the Goldhaber Distinguished Fellowship in 2013, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven Thesis Award in 2014, the ATLAS (CERN) Thesis Award 2014, and the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science Lee Grodzins Postdoctoral Prize in 2016.

The Early Career Research Program, now in its eighth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work. A full list of selectees can be found at: . 

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The �鶹ӰԺ hosted the National Nuclear Physics Summer School on campus from July 9-22, 2017. This is an annual two-week series of lectures for graduate students and postdoctoral research scientists in nuclear physics, and is funded by the National Science Foundation. Each summer the school is in a different location, and this year the �鶹ӰԺ nuclear physics group, consisting of Professors Ed Kinney, Jamie Nagle, Dennis Perepelitsa, and Paul Romatschke, applied and were selected to host the school. The school was expertly coordinated by Emily Flanagan of the Physics Department.   

The school hosted 50 students from all over the country and even the world - from as far away as Chile, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, and Armenia, along with 15 lecturers drawn from nuclear physics experts all over the country. Lecture topics covered all areas of nuclear physics from nuclear medicine to neutron star physics, stockpile stewardship, the science of fundamental particles, and more. The nuclear physics faculty at the �鶹ӰԺ study the sub-atomic structure of the proton and the properties of matter that existed at the ultra-high temperatures in the earliest stages of the Universe. Their research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. These topics were a particular highlight and area of discussion between students and lecturers.    

Every year, approximately 100 Ph.D.s in the United States are awarded in nuclear physics. For these 50 students, the school represents a vibrant way to explore the broad program of nuclear physics research in our country, and learn about the research conducted in the Physics Department here in �鶹ӰԺ.

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Brookhaven National Laboratory has announced that the U.S. Department of Energy recently granted "Critical Decision-Zero" (CD-0) status to the sPHENIX project, a proposed upgrade of the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). This decision paves the way for building a ground-breaking research tool which would have "unprecedented precision for tracking subatomic interactions."

CU Physics Professors Jamie Nagle and Dennis Perepelitsa are research leaders in the new sPHENIX project, and Prof. Nagle previously served as a Co-Spokesperson of the PHENIX detector, which completed its data-taking mission in June 2016. Charged with exploring the interactions between the smallest building blocks of matter, PHENIX parsed collision data from RHIC to study the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, a four-trillion degree primordial soup of fundamental particles thought to have existed microseconds after the
creation of the universe.

The sPHENIX detector will be a significant upgrade to the original PHENIX project. It utilizes a superconducting solenoid magnet repurposed from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), along with state-of-the-art charged-particle-tracking detectors and new electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters to greatly enhance the experimental capabilities sPHENIX, allowing it to measure particle jets produced in collisions at RHIC with unparalleled precision and speed.

The solenoid magnet that will form the core of the sPHENIX detector

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