PHOBOS was one of four experiments that took data in the early years of operation of the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at
Brookhaven National Laboratory. RHIC was a major step forward in the field of ultrarelativistic heavy ion physics. The aim of this field
is to study the nature of matter at an extremely high energy density, not so different from what may have been present in the first microsecond after
the big bang. PHOBOS took data from June 2000 to June 2005.
Our group included SM and Dr. Inkyu Park (now at Seoul University). Joshua Hamblen (now at UTenn, Chattanooga)
and Peter Walters (now in NYC) got Ph.D.'s with our group working
on PHOBOS. We collaborated closely Prof. Wolfs and his PHOBOS group at Rochester, as well as PHOBOS research groups at a number of other places.
Our group's main work on PHOBOS was the study of collective flow, i.e. the study of patterns in the transverse production of particles.
e+e- collisions at the Z with SLD
The Stanford Large Detector (SLD) experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) ran at the collision point of the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) between 1992 and 1998.
The SLC created collisions of electrons and positrons at a center-of-mass energy of 91 GeV, at the peak of the Z boson resonance.
SLD, along with the MARK II experiment at SLAC and four large experiments at CERN, made detailed studies of the decay of the Z particle.
SLD made substantial contributions to our knowledge of electroweak, heavy quark, and QCD physics. The experiment made the single most precise
measurement of the electroweak mixing angle. A review of highlights of the SLD physics program can be found here.
Neutrino Physics with E53 at Fermilab
SM's Ph.D. thesis work involved the analysis of a large data set collected in a wideband neutrino beam at
Fermi National Accelerator Center (Fermilab).
The data was recorded by the 15-foot bubble chamber filled with a helium-neon mix. For his thesis project, SM compared the then-largest (by a factor of 10)
identified electron neutrino sample to a sample of muon neutrino interactions. The work was the best test of neutrino universality made at that time.
Gravitational effects in optical fibers
SM and then graduate student Eric Page (Ph.D. 2001) evaluated the possibility of using the interplay of the gravitationally-induced frequency shift
of light along with dispersion in optical fibers to make a very high precision measurment of the gravitational redsfhit of light as a route to test the
theory of general relativity. This work formed the basis for Eric Page's Ph.D. and was published in Physical Review D. Get your copy of the paper
here!
The primary source of support for most of the research shown on this page is
the
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.