Congratulations to Prof. Andrei Alexandru who has been awarded the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)  grant from the National Science Foundation. It will support his research and educational activities over the next five years. Here’s the title and abstract of the project:

“Nuclear physics from lattice QCD in the chiral regime”

A primary challenge of Nuclear Physics today is to understand the internal structure of hadrons and their complex interactions as they emerge from Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental theory of the strong force. The objective of this proposal is to explore the effects of chiral dynamics on hadron spectrum and structure. In particular, I will focus on electromagnetic polarizabilites, the masses of the lightest hadrons and the behavior of dense nuclear matter at high temperature. To investigate the properties of quarks in the energy region where hadrons are the dominant excitations, I will use a numerical approach, lattice QCD.

On the educational side, I am developing a seminar series, “Modern Physics for Science Teachers” and an undergraduate “Computational Physics” course. The seminars will be designed to help teachers connect the K-12 science curriculum to modern Physics research. The seminar series will constitute a valuable educational opportunity to science teachers and local K-12 students, in a area where the socio-economic and educational indicators are particularly low.

From a broader perspective, this proposal is part of an effort to understand the properties of visible matter in the universe. Complementing a rigorous experimental effort, my research explores the properties of nuclear particles as predicted by QCD. This will help answer questions relating to the composition of the early universe, exotic phases of matter inside neutron stars, charge distributions inside hadrons, origin of nuclear forces, etc. A significant part of my research involves developing numerical methods for QCD that exploit the tremendous computing power of graphics cards (GPUs). The expertise gained in using GPUs to solve nuclear physics problems will have direct applicability to all scientific and engineering fields that use finite-difference methods.