Nuclear and Particle Physics

Primary Current Research Efforts of Rice NPP Faculty

In the Bonner Lab we are trying to understand the most elementary constituents of matter.

We attempt to answer questions such as:

How did the universe come to be?

Are there undiscovered principles of nature?

Why are there so many kinds of particles?

Do all the forces become one?

We do so by participating in the experiments that are underway to study these (and other) questions.

These include:

STAR at RHIC which is used to study the quark gluon plasma. We are working on a time of flight system, which is studying the quark gluon plasma.

The DZero Experiment at Fermilab. The experiment which discovered the top quark continues to make important contributions to particle physics.

The CMS experiment at the US/LHC, the next generation particle physics experiment. We have designed and built a variant of electronics boards for the real time analysis of data.

The CLAS experiment at Jefferson Lab.

Links above have complete descriptions of ongoing research programs

Examples of NPP research at Rice:

A piece of the CMS detector being lowered into place 100m underground.		Display of a single Au + Au ion collision at an energy of 200 A-GeV, shown as an end view of the STAR detector. Outlines of detector elements are shown as well as the thousands of particle tracks from this one event. This particular event is one of the first of several million events acquired by the STAR experiment in 2001.