Award citation:
For his studies of t-tbar pair production in the all-jets channel at D0.
From the BNL Newsroom
On Tuesday, July 21, join Michael Begel of the Physics Department as he gives
the Sambamurti Memorial Lecture, entitled “Spotlight on the Gluon,” in the
Large Seminar Room of the Physics Department, Bldg. 510. Refreshments will be
served at 3 p.m. and the lecture will start at 3:30 p.m.
Among the fundamental forces of nature that cause particles to interact is the
strong force. This force binds quarks — the building blocks of matter —
together into protons and neutrons, which form the atomic nucleus. To describe
the strong interaction of quarks via the exchange of gluons, which carry the
strong force, physicists use the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
Although the force is very strong, gluons act over a very short range, roughly
the size of the proton, making QCD predictions complex and experimental
measurements difficult to interpret.
When protons are collided together at very high energies, for example, at the
Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) or the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL, many of the interesting interactions
involve the strong force. From these collisions, physicists typically observe
collimated sprays of particles, commonly called jets. Rarely, a photon particle
will also be produced. Unlike the jets, which are only distant relatives of the
quarks and gluons that actually collided, the photon is well measured and
easier to understand — allowing researchers to peer deep inside the collision.
Begel will use results from the Fermilab D0 and E706 experiments to explain how
the production rate and energy spectrum of photons produced during proton
collisions can clarify how the energy inside the proton is shared between
quarks and gluons. This improves scientists’ understanding of the strong force,
which is essential to searches for new physical phenomena such as the Higgs
boson, supersymmetry, or large extra dimensions.
About the Speaker
Begel, an assistant physicist who joined BNL in 2007, earned his Ph.D. in
physics from the University of Rochester. He is currently a member of BNL’s
ATLAS collaboration at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, and the
Fermilab D0 and E706 collaborations.
Transparencies: PDF
