Feature Articles

Physicist Robert Palmer has retired after 60 years of running experiments, making discoveries, and pushing particle and accelerator physics forward at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and beyond.

When Cathrine Hamilton and Alison Robey, fall interns at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, first signed on to collaborate with their mentor Laura Fierce, an associate scientist in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department, they didn't imagine they would be contributing to widespread research tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Accelerator physicists are preparing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider for its 21st year of experiments, set to begin on or about February 3, 2021. Instead of producing high-energy particle smashups, the goal for this run is to maximize collision rates at the lowest energy ever achieved at RHIC to search for evidence of a critical point in the transition between nuclear matter and a soup of free quarks and gluons that mimics the conditions of the early universe.

With all the remarkable changes and challenges that took place in 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory had a banner year in science. Read on to learn more about the top stories of 2020.

Two students working under the mentorship of Desigan Kumaran, a structural biologist at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, have helped to identify molecules that could potentially lead to new antiviral drugs for treating COVID-19. Though the students conducted their fall 2020 internships remotely, the potential of their work is firmly planted in the real world and could have lasting impact.

Jack Steinberger, who with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics for their 1962 discovery of the muon neutrino, died on Saturday, December 12, 2020, at his home in Geneva. He was 99.