By Giorgina Paiella

Members of the UConn Materials Research Society (MRS) student chapter had the unique opportunity to tour Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York.

Founded in 1947 and primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the cutting-edge research institution is home to nearly 3,000 scientists, engineers, and support staff who are joined by 4,000 visiting researchers each year from across the globe.

The group toured three facilities during their visit. The first was the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) II, a state-of-the-art medium-energy electron storage ring that produces beams of light in x-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared wavelengths. The synchrotron is predicted to serve a key role in the discovery and analysis of new materials. The group then toured the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and STAR detector, a facility that hosts the collision and detection of atoms at approximately the speed of light and allows for the discovery of new sub-atomic physics phenomena. The students were allowed an exclusive glimpse of the intricate and complex construction of the STAR detector.

The MRS chapter lastly toured the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). The CFN hosts various analysis techniques and is home to nano-fabrication facilities, time resolved absorption and emission spectroscopy, and atomic resolution imaging with scanning transmission (STEM), transmission (TEM), and scanning tunneling (STM) electron microscopy.