Research & Discovery Archive

STAR Result: Charm Quarks Offer Clues to Confinement

Yale Physics and Wright Lab professor Helen Caines is co-spokesperson of the STAR Collaboration, which has recently released a new result that may redefine how nuclear physicists understand hadronization, the process of how particles called quarks and gluons combine to form hadrons, which are composite particles made of two or three quarks.  The measurements, published in Physical Review Letters, revealed many more three-quark hadrons than would have been expected by a widely accepted explanation of hadronization known as fragmentation. The results suggest that, instead, quarks in the dense particle soup created at RHIC recombine more directly through a mechanism known as coalescence. Read more.

Latest CUORE release improves understanding of the neutrino

Wright Lab researchers, part of an international collaboration called the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), are searching for evidence of a rare particle process called neutrinoless double-beta decay. Finding it would have profound implications for understanding neutrinos — the ghostly, plentiful particles that pass through most matter in the universe without being affected themselves. The process might also help explain why there is more matter in the universe than antimatter (which has the same mass as matter, but an opposite electric charge). While the new result did not show evidence of neutrinoless double-beta decay, it yielded a better idea of a neutrino’s mass during such a process. The CUORE group at Yale has been responsible for the design, construction, and commissioning of the CUORE Detector Calibration System, in the analysis and simulation of CUORE and CUORE-0 data, and in research and development for CUPID, the successor to CUORE.  Read more.