BUFFALO, NY - Associate Professor of Physics Michael H. Wood, PhD, will use a new three-year, $105,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate how subatomic particles are created.
“About one micro-second after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for subatomic particles to combine into protons and neutrons,” explains Wood, whose research focuses on how and why that happened. The answers could help experimental nuclear physicists, such as Wood, “figure out the dynamics of the nucleus and the very nature of matter itself.”
Wood will conduct his research at Canisius and at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, VA, which is operated by the Department of Energy. Collaborating with him are researchers from Old Dominion University, Argonne National Laboratory and the Universidad Téchnica Federico Santa Maria in Chile. Canisius physics majors will assist with data analysis.