Faculty Spotlight

At the Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia, associate professor of physics Joerg Reinhold and his colleagues are shaking up the status quo, literally. That’s what you do when you’re an experimental nuclear physicist. As one of four spokepersons for a hypernuclear spectroscopy experiment, Dr. Reinhold interacts with scientists from around the world who are working on the project. The HKS team is comprised of faculty and students from 20 institutions, domestic and international. FIU is one of three institutions leading the team; the other two are Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and Hampton University.

Knowing that ordinary nuclei are comprised of protons and neutrons that contain two up-quarks and one down-quark, Dr. Reinhold and his colleagues are changing the rules of the game: They are replacing one of the up-quarks with a strange quark and observing how those nucleons interact inside normal nuclear matter. (Strange quarks do not exist in stable matter, but they can be created if enough energy is present.)

Dr. Reinhold admits that there are no practical applications at this time to the research. That’s not the point, he says. “It’s about the most basic understanding of matter at the most basic level.”

“There are implications for astrophysics,” he explains. “There might be neutron stars somewhere in the galaxy that contain these strange quarks. We might be able to tell people what can or cannot be bound.”

The research for the multi-year experiment is complete. Reinhold and his team are now analyzing the data.

“We’re not at the stage where we have final results. Now we’re trying to improve the resolution of the nuclear energy levels from the data,” he says. “Most of the analysis time is spent calibrating the data and assigning it to these energy levels.”

Dr. Reinhold joined the project team in 2000 after managing the first strangeness electroproduction experiment at Jefferson Lab in 1996 as a postdoctoral scholar at Argonne National Laboratory. The team ran one experiment in 2000, another one in 2005 and the latest experiment, in 2009, for which the data is now being analyzed.

Professor Reinhold, who has been at FIU 13 years, says he enjoys putting on his hard hat, leather gloves and steel-toed boots. “I like working with equipment, analyzing data and making it work.”

When he’s not in the lab, Dr. Reinhold can be found teaching Physics I. He says he hopes that his students “realize the importance of physics in their lives.”

Dr. Reinhold is one of four experimental nuclear physicists at FIU and nine nuclear physicists in total.

Theorists work on models and make predictions about what will happen. It’s the experimental nuclear physicists like Dr. Reinhold who might work with a screwdriver, record the data and analyze it. The end result, he says, leads to some of the theories being thrown out or parameters being changed.

In addition to the HKS collaboration, Professor Reinhold and two FIU undergraduate students are building new equipment for a planned upgrade to the Jefferson Lab. The facility is being shut down for a year to make the improvements.

To those who wish to pursue a career in nuclear physics, Reinhold says, “The most important thing is that you have a genuine curiosity in it. If you have that interest and a particular set of skills, you will be successful.”

He and three other experimental nuclear physicists at FIU have a large Department of Energy grant that supports graduate and undergraduate students.

Another major effort for Dr. Reinhold has been his leadership in the development of a professional master’s program in medical physics. The roll-out of the two-year program is about one year away.