NSD has received two DOE NP funding awards for two-year projects focussed on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Heather Crawford of the Low Energy Nuclear Physics program will continue to lead a project developing new methods to optimize the performance of the GRETA spectrometer and the VENUS ion source, while Peter Jacobs from the Relativistic Nuclear Collisions program will lead a multi-disciplinary project to develop and deploy novel methods for Bayesian inference and uncertainty quantification. Further details can be found here.
NSD will also collaborate on a newly awarded DOE Nuclear Data project to develop the Berkeley Atlas: a database of absolute cross sections for inelastic, gamma-ray production with 14 MeV neutrons. The project will be led by Johns Hopkins University. The LBNL contribution will be led by Arun Persuad from the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division (ATAP) with Lee Bernstein serving as the NSD lead.
Over the summer, several DOE Highlights featured NSD research, from the final results of the MAJORANA Demonstrator experiment, Lattice QCD results on neutrino-nucleon interaction, and the first observations of the flow patterns of hypernuclei in heavy ion collisions by the STAR collaboration.
In August, NSD Faculty Senior Scientist Barbara Jacak hosted a meeting of the California Electron-Ion Collider consortium. The meeting, which was held on the campus of UC Berkeley, brought together more than fifty physicists from five universities and three national laboratories to coordinate research on physics, calorimetry, and tracking in California.
Also in August, Brian Quiter from NSD’s Applied Nuclear Physics program hosted a workshop on Radiological Data Fusion. The workshop was organized in coordination with DOE NNSA Office of Defence Nonproliferation Research and Development (NA-22) and discussed recent advances and future needs associated with the fusion of radiological and contextual data for nuclear nonproliferation. The workshop was attended by more than forty participants from national laboratories and government agencies.
NSD researcher Bjoern Lehnert has been awarded the 2022 Outstanding Mentor Award by the Berkeley Lab Workforce Development and Education program. Bjoern, who is a Project Scientist in the Neutrinos program, received the award for his mentorship of a student from a minority serving institution through the NSD-led GREAT-NS initiative. Bjoern will formally receive his award at a ceremony on October 3rd.
Zhenyu Ye (pictured left) has joined NSD as a Divisional Fellow in the Relativistic Nuclear Collisions program. Zhenyu joins LBNL from The University of Illinois, Chicago and brings a wealth of experience in the development of novel particle tracking detectors.
Shujie Li of the Relativistic Nuclear Collisions program was promoted from Postdoctoral Researcher to Research Scientist.
NSD also welcomes new hires Karthika Balan (Sr. Scientific Engineering Associate), Yuxun Guo (Postdoctoral Researcher), and Thomas MacDonald (Sr. Scientific Engineering Associate). We also welcome Julia Dreyling and Snehadri Das who are interns with the GREAT-NS and SULI programs, respectively.