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Four researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have been named recipients of Early Career Research Program awards from the DOE Office of Science for 2024.
Whitney Armstrong, Gilberto Fabbris, Tomas Polakovic and Jeremy Rouxel each received the prestigious award, which comes with $550,000 per year for five years to further their research.
This DOE Office of Science program, now in its 15th year, seeks to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to outstanding researchers early in their careers, when many scientists make formative contributions. Ninety-one awardees were selected from a large pool of applicants from universities and national labs based on peer review by scientific experts.
“These early-career scientists have great potential to achieve pivotal discoveries for some of the most complex challenges of our time.” — Paul Kearns, Argonne laboratory director
“Investing in cutting edge research and science is a cornerstone of DOE’s mission and essential to maintaining America’s role as a global innovation leader,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The Biden-Harris Administration is funding scientists and researchers at our nation’s national labs and universities, early in their careers, ensuring they have the resources to expand scientific discovery and pursue solutions to some of the most complex questions.”
Whitney Armstrong is an assistant physicist in Argonne’s Physics division. His primary research focuses on understanding the theory of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), in atomic nuclei. This will involve electron scattering experiments at DOE’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Jefferson Lab and at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
He plans to use the DOE award to develop next-generation detector technology for subatomic particles in nuclear physics applications. Specifically, he plans to use superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors to enable high-impact experiments at Jefferson Lab.
The goal of these experiments is to unravel the quark and gluon structure of the helium-4 nucleus. Quarks and gluons are fundamental particles in QCD that form a nucleus. Armstrong’s experiments will shed light on the role of QCD in light nuclei, such as helium-4.
“The award is a great honor made possible by the wonderful mentorship and continued support I received from my research group, the Physics division, Argonne and the Office of Science leadership,” Armstrong said. “It is a tremendous privilege to help pave a new trail for nuclear physics applications with cutting-edge technology in collaboration with the pioneering researchers in the field of superconducting nanowire detectors. The project aims to be among the first large-scale deployments of superconducting nanowire detectors, leading the way for future particle detection applications.”
Gilberto Fabbris is a physicist in Argonne’s X-ray Science Division. He works at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne, leading the high-pressure research program at the new POLAR beamline. His research explores magnetic properties in materials at extreme conditions using the ultrabright X-ray beams of the APS, one of the world’s brightest X-ray light sources.
Fabbris will build a new instrument at the POLAR beamline with the DOE award. The instrument is called MagXES — named after the technique it specializes in, magnetic X-ray emission spectroscopy — and will leverage novel X-ray spectrometer instrumentation and the increased capabilities of the upgraded APS to study magnetic properties at extreme conditions. These include very low temperatures, high pressures and high magnetic fields, all of which affect the atomic-scale behavior of materials.
By investigating the correlation between electronic and magnetic properties under these conditions, scientists will learn more about what drives novel phenomena in quantum systems. That knowledge will lead to insights into quantum materials and spintronics, with numerous potential applications.
“I’m extremely grateful that this project was chosen for this award,” Fabbris said. “An enormous amount of work from a large group of people at the APS made this possible, and the resulting instrument will be a credit to all of them. I’m excited to see what we learn by leveraging these new capabilities and observing phenomena that have previously been invisible to us.”
Tomas Polakovic is a Maria Goeppert Mayer Fellow also in Argonne’s Physics division. His research focuses on superconducting thin films and their applications in detectors, electronics and quantum information systems. Because these films are made of superconducting materials, they have no electrical resistance at low temperatures, which means no energy is lost when electrons move through a device.
Polakovic will use the DOE award to investigate the use of superconducting nanowire sensors. These wires are a mere ten millionths of a meter wide. This state-of-the-art technology has not previously been used in nuclear physics applications, but it is commonly used in nanophotonics and quantum communication applications. His goal is to solve the challenge of developing reliable superconducting nanowire detectors of charged particles. In doing so, he will expand their effective sensing areas and interface them with semiconducting readout electronics.
He and his team will carry out extensive detector fabrication and characterization, and they will explore how superconducting nanowires can be used not just as sensors, but also as digital and analog electronics and logic devices.
“With quantum detectors developing toward applications outside of quantum information science, interdisciplinary efforts like this one become vital to progress of the field,” Polakovic said. “It’s my hope that this project will turn our expertise and preliminary results on this sensor concept into a fully-fledged superconducting nanowire particle tagger capable of operation in conditions of the EIC at Brookhaven. Beyond that, I’d like to see this research aid in developing new technologies that can push the boundaries of experimental nuclear physics.”
Jeremy Rouxel is an assistant physicist in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering division. His research focuses on methods for probing the dynamics of molecules through their ultrafast and nonlinear interactions with X-rays. He investigates molecular systems that demonstrate evolving chirality, employing both theoretical and experimental approaches. A molecule is considered “chiral” if it does not contain a plane of symmetry, and thus cannot be superimposed on its mirror image. This property is common in nature and is found on all scales, from the shape of galaxies to certain properties of subatomic particles. It is crucial across a broad array of open questions in chemistry, including both fundamental problems and applied challenges.
Rouxel will use the DOE award to develop new X-ray spectroscopy techniques to explore chirality as it occurs in molecules. These techniques will provide a qualitatively new type of element-sensitive local information that will help scientists understand the structure and evolution of chirality at the atomic level.
“Chiral molecules are ubiquitous in chemistry, but are difficult to distinguish from one another,” Rouxel said. “Established techniques probe the overall structure. X-rays from the upgraded Advanced Photon Source and X-ray free-electron lasers will allow us to probe asymmetries in the vicinity of a chosen atom within the molecules.”
“These early-career scientists have great potential to achieve pivotal discoveries for some of the most complex challenges of our time,” said Paul Kearns, Argonne laboratory director. “They exemplify the world-class community of talent that we have at Argonne, and I am excited to see what they will accomplish with their cutting-edge research.”
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
