Changes

=== Revision ===

=== Revision ===

Since the discovery of the atom, physicists have been trying to figure out what exactly is the most basic form of matter.  Jefferson National Laboratory, has come up with a way to take a closer look inside the nucleus of the of the atom in the hopes of finding new forms of matter.  The way to do this is by shooting a beam of electrons at a target and to produce photons, or light particles, with very high energy .  The University of Connecticut Nuclear Physics group is designing a detector to “tag” the amount energy the photons will have.  This “tagger” will use massive electromagnets to bend the beam of electrons.  The electrons with the higher energy will bend gradually, and the electrons with lower energy will bend sharply.  The bent beam of electrons will then hit an acrylic fiber known as a scintillator. A scintillator is a material that when struck by an electron, will produce photons. These scintillators are glued to “waveguides” that guide the photons to photon detectors.  When one of the photon detectors reports that it saw a photon, we can determine the energy of the electron based on how far down the line of detectors the electron went.

Since the discovery of the atom, physicists have been working to figure out what are most fundamental forms of matter and their interactions.  At the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia a team of nuclear physicists  has come up with a way to probe the nuclear "glue" that binds quarks together inside protons and neutrons.  The probe to be used in this experiment consists of a beam of polarized particles of light called photons with a specific energy close to 10 billion electron-Volts.  The University of Connecticut Nuclear Physics group is designing a detector to “tag” the amount energy the photons will have.  This detector consists of a large array of closely-packed optical fibers made of a special plastic called "scintillator" that produces a brief flash of light whenever it is struck by a high-energy particle. These scintillators are coupled to individual photodiodes which convert the flashes of light into electrical pulses that are recorded during the course of an experiment.  This detector was designed by the UConn group, and the methods and tooling for the construction of the fiber detectors is under development by undergraduate researchers in the Physics Department at Storrs.  The immediate goal of this project is the construction of a scaled-down prototype of the tagging detector, which will be tested under realistic conditions in a photon beam at Jefferson Lab prior to launching the construction of the full-scale detector.