A&M “Atom-Smasher” Honored with Sloan Fellowship

While most people are taught at a young age to be careful not to break things, Saskia Mioduszewski’s fundamental research in nuclear physics depends on it.

In her case, “things” are atomic nuclei, which hold the secrets to understanding what matter is made of.

Mioduszewski, an assistant professor of physics at Texas A&M, carries out research with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), where ions (atomic nuclei) as heavy as gold are smashed together at high energies.

Her research recently earned her a two-year, $45,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to continue related work.

RHIC, located in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, currently is the largest heavy ion accelerator in the world. Mioduszewski flies there periodically to work on the experiment.

Within RHIC, ions are smashed at very high energies, creating what she said is thought to be a new state of matter known as the Quark Gluon Plasma, in which the most elementary building blocks of matter — quarks and gluons — interact freely.

“That was thought to have been the state of the early universe after the Big Bang,” Mioduszewski said. “Our goal is to understand the interaction that holds matter together and makes up the world as we know it.

“This is very basic science in the sense that we are not trying to discover anything that has immediate applications. Rather, it is for the sake of understanding the most basic interactions of matter.”

Mioduszewski explained that, while it would represent a very important discovery, the applications for this type of basic achievement typically come many years later. She paralleled the research to the discovery of electrons, a finding that eventually resulted in a plethora of new technologies which simply were unfathomable at the time.

“There’s no way we can recreate the universe, but we would like to learn more about how it was created, and that’s what we’re trying to do here,” she added.

Because the matter created in these collisions only exists for literal mere fractions of a second — 10^-23 seconds, to be exact — Mioduszewski said characterizing the matter on the basis of the particles that come out of it is a challenging process. Based on the data she and her colleagues have analyzed so far, they are indeed creating a very dense form of matter. Originally they believed the Quark Gluon Plasma to be like a gas of weakly interacting quarks and gluons, but instead, they discovered they had made a very dense, strongly interacting form of matter that behaves more like a fluid.

“Now that we have learned more, we have new questions about what we have discovered so far,” Mioduszewski said.

Fellowship Administrator for the Sloan Foundation Erica Stella said the winners are people who have demonstrated an outstanding promise of making contributions to their own fields and individual work.

“This is an early recognition of a distinguished performance, and we feel that the people who have won have demonstrated that they are highly qualified,” Stella said. “Not only does the monetary value help them, but it’s really the prestige of the fellowship that will carry them on in their career development.”

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