Feature: NSCL Targets A National Need with Science Ed for Undergrads
Tapping into a long tradition of hands-on apprenticeship, MSU's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory accelerates undergraduates into science.
Ninety-nine years ago, a group of young physicists shooting tiny particles into a slim gold sheet stumbled onto a giant discovery. While millions of the subatomic slugs whizzed straight through their target, about one in 20,000 smacked something solid—and bounced back.
The researchers, led by Nobel Laureate Ernest Rutherford, had uncovered the nucleus—the incredibly dense, positively-charged core of the atom. Their find killed the old model of the atom, which pictured electrons dotted through a blob of positive charge like plums in a Christmas pudding. And it launched the field of nuclear physics. In ensuing years, that field has inspired technologies ranging from MRIs and medical cyclotrons to carbon dating and nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, it’s helped us understand the makeup and history of our universe.
But these days, in this country, there’s a problem. For decades, the United States led the world in scientific innovation. Now, other countries are catching up – fast. A recent National Science Foundation study found that between 1985 and 2005, the number of bachelors’ degrees in science and engineering awarded in China, South Korea, and the United Kingdom more than doubled. In the United States, that figure grew by only 40 percent.
The trend is especially pronounced in the physical and biological sciences, where future nuclear physicists are likely to start out. That leaves fewer innovators to create new medical therapies, fewer inventors to keep anti-terrorism technologies up-to-date, and fewer fresh minds to dream up answers to the thousands of basic questions that remain unanswered.
How do protons and neutrons, the building blocks of nuclei, stick together? How did the earliest nuclei form, in the first seconds after the Big Bang? And how do supernovae produce the heavier elements—“star-stuff,” in Carl Sagan’s terminology—that make up planets, plants, plutonium, and our very own bodies?
Such questions remain as profound as ever. But unless the United States makes bold new commitments to scientific research and education, we’re unlikely to answer them here. That’s the warning from a 2007 report from the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century, sponsored by the National Academies.
“The rapid pace of technological change and the increasing mobility of capital knowledge and talent mean that our current lead in science and technology could evaporate more quickly than is generally recognized if we fail to support it,” the report concludes. “The consequences would be enormous, and once lost, our lead would be difficult to regain.”
From MSU to Cambridge, with a passion for particle physics
The committee paints a grim picture, but, they say, there’s hope. Among its key recommendations is education: “We must encourage and enable U.S. students from all sectors of our own society to participate in science. We must develop the best and brightest students and scientists.”
They’d be hard-pressed to find someone better or brighter than Cambridge University doctoral student Victoria Moeller, ’07. Today, in a lab where Rutherford once worked, she’s helping to keep American scientists on the world stage. Moeller studies micro black holes: tiny, quantum mechanically-governed phenomena that could reveal extra dimensions through which gravity can ripple.
“Every day, I get to work on some of the most revolutionary topics out there,” she says from Cambridge University’s famed Cavendish Laboratory. “Micro black holes, quantum gravity…there’s a reason they call my field exotic physics!”
After graduating from MSU in 2007, with bachelor’s degrees in physics and political science, Moeller headed to England as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. That prestigious honor carries a $40,000 to $50,000 annual stipend, enough to cover her studies and regular travel to CERN, home of the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator, which straddles the French-Swiss border.
Like much of the international physics community, Moeller spent the summer anxiously awaiting the startup of CERN’s ultra-powerful Large Hadron Collider. As one of the roughly 2,000 scientists at work on the ATLAS experiment, she’ll use the LHC to stalk particles beyond the purview of the reigning subatomic theory. “We’re exploring the physics beyond the Standard Model,” says Moeller. “Whatever we find, whether it’s what we expect, or something we couldn’t expect, it will be very exciting.”
Still, amidst all this far-seeing science, she hasn’t forgotten the shoulders she stands on: “Doing research at MSU is the reason I stuck with physics,” she says. “It’s the reason I’m still doing research today.”
Moeller began probing the nucleus in her freshman year at MSU, as an undergraduate researcher at National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. NSCL, modestly tucked between the Wharton Center and Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building, is one of the top three U.S. nuclear science facilities, and the only one so tightly integrated into the fabric of a university campus.
The federal government – mostly the National Science Foundation, but also the Department of Energy – has supported the nuclear physics program at MSU since the 1960s. The designation as a national lab dates back to 1978, when the U.S. Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, recommended the construction of NSCL at Michigan State. Adjusted for inflation, the combined half-century federal-MSU support for the laboratory exceeds $700 million.
But it’s not just local scientists and surrounding community who benefit. A national user facility, NSCL welcomes hundreds of outside researchers to use the facility and has a standing community of more than 700 users from 32 countries.
Most of the lab’s research centers on rare isotopes, fleeting nuclei containing unusual numbers of protons and neutrons. Just last year, in a study published in Nature, NSCL scientists created three isotopes never before seen on earth. The discovery generated media coverage around the world in outlets ranging from the Los Angeles Times and the BBC to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a leading financial daily in Germany.
Forging fleeting bits of matter, and new scientists
The process NSCL scientists use to make these isotopes is a bit like a beefed-up version of Rutherford’s experiment. Using powerful magnets in lab’s two coupled cyclotrons, researchers whirl electron-stripped nuclei up to half the speed of light, then hurl them at a fixed piece of foil (not gold this time—usually carbon or beryllium).
These projectiles – up to 60 times heavier than Rutherford’s alpha particles, and zooming up to five times as fast – don’t just bounce off their marks. They shatter when they hit the target nuclei, sending new mash-ups of protons and neutrons flying off at high speed. A few of these progeny hold the exotic combinations the experimenters seek. The next trick: fishing out those few.
Experimenters use more magnets to bend the mixed beam of products through a zig-zag course that stretches more than a football field in length. The track is carefully rigged so only the desired nuclei can maneuver all the curves. At various end points, those nuclei implant in detectors, which read off their position, speed, radioactive half-life, and other specs. The data stream to computers nearby, where scientists and their students put on their analysis caps. By dialing up the nucleus and detector types, researchers can run thousands of different experiments one after the other in the same facility.
Thanks to that intense production line – and a powerhouse faculty – MSU ranks second in the nation for nuclear physics graduate studies. Ten percent of the field’s PhDs come from this 150,000-square-foot corner of campus.
Still, the graduate program is only part of the NSCL’s educational mission. The lab typically employs around 50 undergraduates who do everything from writing complex computer programs to machining components for superconducting magnets. And last year, over 4,000 visitors dropped in for tours, camps, and guest lectures. Many were elementary, middle, and high school students and teachers who brought their own zest for exotic physics back home.
On an average day in the lab, you’ll see a bevy of college students tapping keyboards and chatting with professors, a group of seventh-graders marveling at the gleaming cylinders of liquid helium used to cool the magnets and rainbow tangles of wire in the experimental area, maybe even a cluster of eight-year-olds simulating nuclear reactions by knocking marbles together on a tabletop.
Scenes like that make MSU president Lou Anna K. Simon beam. “If you look at any report on the future of America, it says we need more scientists. A place like this is open,” she said at a lab news briefing on July 1, 2008 (see sidebar). “You’ll see students of all ages – a whole range of people really getting excited about science.”
“NSCL is a great lab,” agrees Warren Rogers, professor and chair of the physics and engineering department at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif. “It’s very embracing of outside users, very encouraging of new experiments, and very open to undergraduates being an integral part of experiments. All the pieces are in place here.”
Rogers finds the educational component particularly unique. He began running experiments at the facility 12 year ago, and, he says, “I started bringing my undergraduates here immediately.”
“I teach at a small college,” he explains. “One of the benefits of bringing my students here is that they get to see a lot more physics going on. And they get to see the human face of science. That’s a real motivation, and revelation, in many cases. It really helps shape and form their career aspirations. It’s easy to get excited about research once you do it, and once you see other people who do it with passion.”
Since 2001, Rogers’ students have had a special opportunity to actually bethe face of science. The Modular Neutron Array project (MoNA) teams up undergraduates from Westmont, MSU, and eight other colleges. Those students helped build MoNA, which tracks the neutrons that spray off certain nuclear collisions, quite literally from the ground up.
With support from the NSF, the young collaborators crafted parts of the detector at their home institutions. In the summer of 2007, they traveled to East Lansing to add their components to the system.
After carefully stacking the detector’s 144 scintillation tubes, the students crowned their creation with the MoNA logo. It’s a montage of emblems from the NSCL, MSU, and the other member schools, with a Latin motto curving around the frame. Quam difficile esse potest, it reads, or in a wry translation, “How hard can it be?”
Now, several of those students are helping to analyze MoNA’s experimental results. Over the summer, participants in the NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates joined the efforts. Holly Brown, a junior from Florida State University, spent part of her REU summer showing MoNA to an even younger audience: campers from the weeklong Physics of Atomic Nuclei program.
In more studious hours, Brown focused on unraveling the theoretical intricacies of carbon-16. She was thrilled to work closely with Filomena Nunes, an NSCL theorist.
“It’s incredible, because you can walk down the hall, and everyone knows what’s going on. They’re not sequestered with their own experiments or their own research problems. They’re sharing and working together. And since it’s a user facility, you see people from all over the world coming to use the NSCL.”
Brown easily caught the buzz. Midway through the summer, she was already set on graduate school plans—a physics Ph.D., followed by more research. The only toss-up: whether she’d lean to the experimental or theoretical side. “They’re both vital. We need to have scientists that are interested in physics again and to see where it takes us.”
A vision for the future
In the short term, at least, NSCL has a clear strategy. To remain internationally competitive in the coming years, MSU is investing several million dollars to add new office and experimental space, and also a low-energy linear accelerator that will create a world-unique niche for the laboratory in nuclear astrophysics research.
Further down the road, the lab will need a major technology boost, which could come in the form of a massive new facility the federal government plans to build in the next decade. The proposed Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) will produce rarer, heavier, and more intriguing nuclei, plus major spin-off applications in medical sciences, national security, materials sciences, and other businesses. MSU tossed its hat in the ring in July, submitting a proposal to build FRIB in East Lansing. Leaders in government and industry, particularly in Michigan, have lined up behind the project.
“This facility is essential to maintaining U.S. leadership in the physics of nuclei,” said U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D.- Mich.) at the July 1 briefing. “The stakes for this nation are huge.”
The winning site should be picked by the end of the year. Though NSCL faces tough competition from another national laboratory, the MSU site offers a peerless advantage – its university surroundings.
“Big science in an academic environment is sort of the best of all worlds,” NSCL director Konrad Gelbke says. “If we win this, we will have continued hands-on education of the nuclear science workforce via the best possible synergy of education and research.”
Rogers, currently the executive director of the MoNA collaboration, shares that vision. “If all we had was an army of scientists working at labs without any educational links, I think science would dry up,” he says. “FRIB will represent a great opportunity for the education of the workforce of the U.S. It’s so important that we get a continued infusion of young people.”
Indeed, they’re what’s fueled nuclear physics since its beginnings. It’s been almost a century since Rutherford’s young team struck gold. But the nucleus still guards its deepest secrets, and it’s up to the next generation of scientists to reveal them.
“I think we’re just starting on the most interesting questions,” says Moeller.
With computers humming in the background of her lab, pictures of groundbreaking Cavendish experimenters like Rayleigh and Bragg and Watson and Crick peering down from the walls, she steals a few minutes to muse about the situation at home.
“We know that facilities like FRIB, and the NSCL in general, are part of the federal initiative to sustain science in America,” she says, pausing to help a colleague adjust an instrument. “But on a more personal, more practical level, I can promise you that the people go where the lab is. Keeping labs in the U.S. will bring the community of scientists that we need to do research. It’s the community that is really crucial to science.”
If Michigan State wins the FRIB bid, sometime soon, in a lab right here in East Lansing, a community of young physicists might just make the next giant find.
Rachel Carr, a fourth year student at the University of Virginia, was the NSCL's summer 2008 science writer. She has also written for symmetry, the CERN Courier, Geotimes, and Innovation and writes a regular column for the Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at rachelcarr@virginia.edu.
A NUCLEAR BOOST FOR MSU—AND THE STATE OF MICHIGAN
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) is a half-billion dollar federal project devoted to innovative research in nuclear science. In July 2008, the U.S. Dept. of Energy accepted applications from potential host institutions, including MSU. FRIB would sustain Michigan State’s leadership in nuclear research and education while providing hundreds of jobs and an estimated $1 billion economic boost to the state. Learn more about the project and voice your support to elected officials at scienceandjobsformichigan.com.
MEDIA LINKS: THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE AT NSCL
Alumni Voices…
“It was an outstanding education.”— Jon Kruse, now an instructor of radiological physics at the Mayo Clinic, on obtaining a Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics at the NSCL
NSCL alumni excel in a wide range of professions. Listen to several tell their own stories at www.nscl.msu.edu/alums
Undergraduate Faces…
“My involvement with the MoNA collaboration as an undergraduate student gave me a small glimpse into the workings of a big national laboratory, and actually it inspired me to pursue a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from MSU.”—Phil Voss, MSU doctoral student
Watch students and professors discuss the MoNA project in a video documentary at www.nscl.msu.edu/mona