On Feb. 28th, I had the privilege to give the bi-weekly seminar at Stony Brook’s Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science. The timing could not have been better for me to talk about our group’s latest paper, in Nature, about the force between protons and neutrons at extremely short distances. One of the best things about the trip was getting to see all of the impressive R&D projects going on at Stony Brook, relating to the future sPHENIX detector, and the future Electron-Ion Collider.
The highlights include seeing the prototype “Time Projection Chamber” (TPC) for sPHENIX, which will be able to simultaneously image the trajectories of thousands of charged particles. I also got to see the prototype of the polarized electron gun which will inject electrons into the future EIC. Lastly, it always warms my heart to see a Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator, since that’s the kind of machine run by Yale’s Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory, where I did my first undergraduate research projects.