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SLAC chemist Kelly Gaffney (Brad Plummer/SLAC)Curiosity created the chemist

Looking back at his childhood, Kelly Gaffney of DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recalls the joys of exploring rocky Puget Sound beaches near his Seattle home and engaging in challenging, evidence-driven dinner-table discussions with his parents and older sister.

Now he’s enjoying similar explorations and thought-provoking debates as a chemist and associate professor at PULSE, a joint SLAC/Stanford institute for ultrafast energy science. He’s using ultrashort, intense X-ray laser pulses from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to learn how molecules absorb and store energy and how chemical bonds are created and modified.

In recent years, Gaffney’s group has shown how hydrogen bonds switch between water molecules and resolved questions posed in the 1980s about how important catalysts respond to light and promote chemical reactions.

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The proton is a complicated blob. It is composed of three particles, called quarks, which are surrounded by a roiling sea of gluons that "glue" the quarks together.Supercomputers help answer the big questions about the universe

The proton is a complicated blob. It is composed of three particles, called quarks, which are surrounded by a roiling sea of gluons that "glue" the quarks together. In addition to interacting with its surrounding particles, each gluon can also turn itself temporarily into a quark-antiquark pair and then back into a gluon.

This tremendously complicated subatomic dance affects measurements that are crucial to answering important questions about the universe, such as: What is the origin of mass in the universe? Why do the elementary particles we know come in three generations? Why is there so much more matter than antimatter in the universe?

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See also…

DOE Pulse
  • Number 416  |
  • June 23, 2014