Physics Research to Better Understand Our World

LTU physics professors Drs. Bhujyo Bhattacharya and George Moschelli have been conducting important and exciting fundamental research for the past three years or more. They and their students have been looking deep into the origins of our universe and report their respective findings in the stories that appear below. While their research continues, there's promise in what they've already discovered.

Matter, Antimatter: Does it Matter? LTU Physicist Studies The Origins of The Universe

For the last three years, Dr. Bhubanjyoti Bhattacharya and his students have been researching the origins of our universe through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Award No. PHY 2013984 titled “RUI: Discovering New Sources of CP Violation in Flavor Phenomenology.”

In the abstract section of this grant, Bhattacharya explains that the goal of the study is to answer the question “Where is all the antimatter?” He writes, “Matter and antimatter behave similarly under a fundamental symmetry called Charge-Parity, or "CP". However, processes involving elementary particles may not respect this symmetry. Discovery of new physics theories that violate CP will lead to a better understanding of our universe, as they will be able to explain why there is more matter than antimatter. … research in this area advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science, creating a deeper understanding of elementary particles, their properties, and how they interact.”

Bhattacharya and several collaborators from around the world have authored and published peer-reviewed articles, proposing new methods by which experimental physicists should try to measure Charge-Parity violations. Bhattacharya worked on this research with Andrea Houck, an LTU 2021 alumnus in physics and mathematics and now a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She is a prestigious Ed Donley Award winner as well as a winner of the coveted NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. With other coauthors, Bhattacharya and Houck recently submitted a pre-print paper on arxiv.org titled “Charmless B→PPP Decays: the Fully-Antisymmetric Final State” that describes the results of their more than two-year exploration.

Earlier articles have appeared in peer-reviewed publications, including the Journal of High Energy Physics , Physical Review D , and Physical Review D Letters , among others.

In the summer, Bhattacharya received renewed NSF funding Award No. PHY 2310627 to continue this important research into how the universe came to be.

Research Student Gabe Dresen ‘25

Just two weeks into his job as researcher with Bhattacharya, mechanical engineering junior Gabe Dresen said that he chose mechanical engineering because it gave him the broadest perspective on how things work. Not only did Dresen like Physics 2, “I liked Dr. B and his teaching style,” he said. As Dresen explained, because he knows nothing about the subject of charge-parity, “I’m starting out by reviewing the literature to get an idea of what’s been researched and reported before by Bhattacharya and others.” Bhattacharya told Dresen, “We’ll learn together,” which put Dresen at ease. “I know so little about this field and I love to learn,” Dresen said. “This work can help us expand into the farthest reaches of our imagination and expand the realms of human knowledge.” In other words, yes, it matters.

Quarks, Gluons, Strong Force…Oh, my! LTU Physicist Studies How to Control The Strong Force

Through an NSF grant Award No. PHY-1913005 , Dr. George Moschelli has been researching ways to control the strong force, which is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak force. The strong force is the strongest force of them all and binds fundamental particles of matter, known as quarks, to form protons. Why study the strong force? Moschelli says that, while thousands of people have been studying this phenomenon for decades, this research attempts to learn how to control it. “We don’t know what it is exactly or how it will be applied,” he said. 

An artist’s impression of a quark-gluon plasma short after the Big Bang

(© User:S13mashina /  Wikimedia Commons  /  CC-BY-SA-4.0 )

But Moschelli explained the premise of his research and the outcomes. “Two of the world’s largest ever experimental facilities, the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider, collide atomic nuclei at nearly the speed of light. One of the main objectives of these experiments is to study how the ‘strong nuclear force’ works. The most cutting-edge theory of the strong nuclear force is called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). QCD predicts that when large nuclei are pressed together with very high energy (like a collision), a new form of matter called quark-gluon plasma (QGP) will be formed. QGP is also the phase of matter that existed after the big bang birth of our universe. Theoretical calculations of QGP using QCD are often limited to a very strong assumption of a kind of uniformity called equilibrium. However, the matter created by the real collisions in the experiments are very likely not in the equilibrium state. I work on methods for connecting the theory to this out-of-equilibrium state. These methods will allow theories to extract properties of QGP that are more realistic and tell us about the nature of the strong nuclear force.

“To explain the importance of understanding the strong force,” Moschelli said, “I like to make the analogy to our discovery of the electromagnetic force. Our understanding of the electromagnetic force is really the backbone of all modern technology. It's the force that holds our molecules together and it's also the force that we use to make all electronics and computers work. It's even the force that connects light to our world.”

Moschelli continued by putting this in a historical perspective. He said, “The equations that we use to understand the theory of the electromagnetic force were written down in the period of 1773-1865. The first light bulb was patented in 1879. They were studying electromagnetism by candlelight. That took 100 years. And we were just beginning to understand electromagnetism. We know a lot more now. It took us 150 more years. Compare humanity in the 1800's to now. Our understanding of the strong force will have the same impact as our understanding of electromagnetism. We're still in that first period, trying to discover all the rules. When we are done, our society now will seem only as advanced as candlelight.” 

His last publication appeared in January 2023. It took several years to complete this project and three undergraduates (Mary Cody, Mark Kocherovsky, and Brendan Koch) were co-authors. All those students have since graduated but they contributed greatly to our research.”

On July 26, he presented his research findings , a continuation of his January article, at the 19th International Conference on QCD in Extreme Conditions in Coimbra, Portugal. 

While that NSF grant expired in August, Moschelli’s study of the strong force carries on. He’s also investigating how to apply new mathematical and machine learning methods for data analysis to his work.