During an introductory nuclear physics course her sophomore year, Elizabeth Mae Scott developed a need to understand things from their most basic, original structure. The course showed her how math becomes a language that physicists use to describe the world around them.

“Fundamental physics is a way to pry at the cosmos. It’s really fun to try to understand the tenets of how things work, to push the boundaries of how we describe our universe,” she said.

Scott earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics from Tulane University. Now a graduate student in nuclear physics at UT, she continues to push those boundaries as part of a collaborative experiment called Nab at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

A team of researchers led by University of Tennessee, Knoxville, physics professor Sarah Cousineau has made the first-ever 6D measurement of an accelerator beam, an achievement that has eluded scientists for decades.

The new measurement will advance understanding of what goes on inside accelerators and help scientists and engineers build more powerful ones in the future. The findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters today.

Cousineau co-authored the paper with UT graduate student and lead author Brandon Cathey and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Alexander Aleksandrov and Alexander Zhukov.

Wednesday, March 1

Getting there

We flew from Atlanta to Paris and then boarded a little Airbus A319 to Moscow. The Oak Ridge team is also almost complete and will also be representing Tennessee. The photo you see [in the gallery] is right before landing at Szeremetevo Airport. All has gone rather smoothly so far.

The taxi driver will take us to Dubna which is north of Moscow and is a location of the JINR institute where the superheavy discoveries took place.

It is a cold late winter day with dirty snow on the roadside. The ride is about an hour and a half—60 miles or so. The landscape is like in Michigan or something I remember from where I grew up (in Poland).

Principal Martin McDonald and students from Oak Ridge High School accepted the first new chart of the periodic table featuring element tennessine and signed by Governor Bill Haslam and ORNL Director Thom Mason. To mark the discovery of tennessine, UT-Battelle is donating a new chart to all public middle and high schools in Tennessee. ORNL photo.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam visited the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory today to congratulate the team involved in the discovery of the element tennessine, named in recognition of the vital contributions of the state of Tennessee to the international search for new superheavy elements.