Graduate education at WNSL
Nuclear Structure
Graduate students in nuclear structure carry out a wide variety of frontline research in stable and exotic nuclei. Students are involved in every aspect of their projects, from the initial physics motivation to final data analysis and interpretation. At the same time, students have the opportunity to specialize in any aspect of the experimental process they enjoy working in, including hardware, software, electronics, computation, data analysis, physics interpretation, or nuclear models.
Before graduating, all students will have built a piece of equipment, designed and run his or her own experiment, and had the opportunity to do experiments at other labs (Argonne, Technische Universität München, Grenoble, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, or Legnaro, for example).
Nuclear Astrophysics
In this small group, graduate students play key roles in every aspect of their thesis experiments. These experiments are typically focused on the synthesis of nuclei in explosive astrophysical environments, including the study of reactions involving short-lived radioactive nuclei. Most recently this work has focused on the production of radioactive 26Al, whose decay gamma rays are seen distributed thoughout our galaxy.
This work is carried out both at the Yale accelerator facility (typically in coincidence measurements using our magnetic spectrometer coupled to an array of silicon detectors) and at various off-site radioactive-beam facilities at Vancouver, Oak Ridge, or Argonne, etc.
Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics
The goal of our research is to form and study a new state of matter called the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). The research is experimental and at the forefront of science (see recent press). Present work (and future upgrades) focus on the STAR experiment at the RHIC collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island (New York) and on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland). STAR has been in operation since the year 2000 and ALICE will commence operation next year.
The group is actively involved in data-taking and analysis in STAR and in planning a new hybrid-pixel detector for future implementation in STAR. The group will assemble, test and calibrate a new electromagnetic calorimeter at Yale for installation in ALICE at CERN. New graduate students can expect to work with hardware and software at Yale and on either or both of these experiments. These opportunities provide students with a breadth of knowledge preparing them for a range of jobs upon graduation.
