The nucleus of the atom is the focus of a continuing study by the Old Dominion University Experimental Nuclear Physics Group.

Its research just received renewed support in the form of a $1.35 million research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The study, "From Quarks to Nuclei," probes the strong interaction which binds quarks together to form protons and neutrons and holds them together in atomic nuclei.

The Old Dominion group uses high-energy electrons from the accelerators in Newport News (Jefferson Lab) and Mainz, Germany, to study the internal structure of nucleons and their constituents by scattering the electrons from various targets and examining the resulting particles which emerge from their atomic nuclei.

They then extract new information on the properties of the strong force from the collected data. As the strong force is responsible for nearly all the visible matter and energy in the universe, such information is of vital importance to science.

The group is led by principal investigator Paul Ulmer, assistant professor of physics, and physics colleagues Gail Dodge, Charles Hyde-Wright,Andreas Klein, Sebastian Kuhn and Larry Weinstein as co-principal investigators.

Many graduate students are working on doctoral thesis projects connected with this research: Mehmet Bektasoglu, Luca Ciciani, Vipuli Darmawardane, Sue Duncan, Christophe Jutier, Kathy McCormick, Rustam Niyazov, Luminita Todor, Kelley Vansyoc, Frank Wesselmann and Jun Ho Yun. In addition, the grant supports two postdoctoral research associates, Tony Forest and Franck Sabatie, and several undergraduates.

The university's latest DOE grant is remarkable in that it constitutes a significant funding increase (16 percent) at a time when federal funds are scarce. This increase recognizes the group's accomplishments in providing state-of-the-art detection equipment for Jefferson Lab and for leading many of the international scientific collaborations doing research there.

These funds, in addition to supporting the above personnel, will be used to significantly expand the group's computer facilities to meet the demands of analyzing the vast amount of data that result from these complex experiments.

"Although it's impossible to say now what applications this research will have, experience has repeatedly shown that scientific advances are accompanied by new technologies," Ulmer said. "For the moment, it's pure research - knowledge for knowledge's sake."