BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY - Pixels and particles collide, thanks to a pioneering student’s idea to mesh the world of video game technology with real-world physics.
Sean Preins, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside), has developed a customizable virtual reality program called VIRTUE, or Virtual Interactive Reality Toolkit for Understanding the EIC, that allows users to journey into the heart of the groundbreaking Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) and explore the thrilling clash of particles in the EIC’s particle detector.
The EIC will be built at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory in partnership with DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Unlike any other particle collider, it will collide polarized, or spin-aligned, electrons with polarized protons and ions to investigate the innermost details of the building blocks of matter with unprecedented precision.