Expanding the frontiers of science

Posted: March 1, 2012 1:00 p.m.

Dr. George Lolos, Department of Physics
Dr. George Lolos, Department of Physics Photo: U of R Photography Dept.

Students hard at work in a small physics lab at the University of Regina are building equipment that will be used to seek answers to one of the most fundamental questions in science today: Why does matter stay together?

Their work is part of a major international research effort called The GlueX Project  that Dr. George Lolos and Dr. Zisis Papandreou of the Department of Physics have been working on for more than a decade.

GlueX was initiated to allow scientists to study the behavior of quarks, the infinitesimally small particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. Researchers want to know why quarks are always found in pairs or triplets, a phenomenon called "confinement," because this answer would explain why matter stays together.

"GlueX is the defining experiment that will help us solve the puzzle of confinement," Lolos says.

The University of Regina has played a leading role in this research from the beginning and is responsible for constructing the largest and most critical component of the detector that will be used to study the interaction of the quarks.

The modules that will make up the detector are assembled in Regina then transported to Jefferson Lab in Virginia, U.S., where the experiment will officially begin in 2015.

Lolos says research such as this is driven by curiosity, rather than a specific practical application. But he notes much of the technology society enjoys today, such as lasers and MRIs, were the results of pure science research.

Search for Gluonic Excitations: The GlueX Project is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the United States Department of Energy.