Newswise — In a new ranking by ScienceWatch.com, Stony Brook University has been named one of the top 10 institutions worldwide for Hadron Collider research. SBU was named 8th best overall—which includes national laboratories—and the 3rd best university in the world.
Stony Brook’s strong programs in both nuclear and particle physics theory are key factors in the university’s high ranking. These programs produce important papers and numerous citations and help to attract both funding and exceptional students to SBU.
“We have strong research efforts in theory and in three major experimental hadron collider physics programs, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab’s Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and have provided the leadership of two of these experiments,” said Laszlo Mihaly, Chair of Stony Brook University’s Department of Physics. “This distinction recognizes our faculty and student’s consistently high level of research—both in terms of quality and intensity—in this area of physics.”
Stony Brook University has been instrumental in the design, development and construction of two very large international collaborations, D0 and PHENIX—both of which have led to major discoveries. In addition, university faculty have provided leadership in both collaborations, including Research Professor and Distinguished Professor of Physics Emeritus Paul Grannis, who served as spokesperson for D0 from 1983-1996—and Distinguished Professor Barbara Jacak who is the current spokesperson for PHENIX. Hadrons are building blocks of the nucleus of the atom. High energy is required—which in turn needs large scale instrumentation—to break up the colliding protons or nuclei, and to study their constituents and the fundamental forces at play in forming them. “In this area of physics, scientists form large collaborations and rely on large instruments—it’s not as though we can set up experiments in the lab and then watch the results,” notes Mihaly. “Extensive travel to the accelerator locations is often required in order for scientists to conduct necessary research.”
ScienceWatch.com, a division of the Thomson Reuters organization, provides one of the largest available databases for scientific papers and citations in the world. It is a behind-the-scenes look at the information selected by Essential Science Indicators (ESI), a compilation of statistical information (publication, citation and cites-per-paper) for scientist, institutions, countries and journals.
The scientific papers and citations used for this database were published between January 1, 2000 and June 30, 2010. This analysis was created using the Web of Science® from Thomson Reuters. For more information and a complete list of the top-20 institutions, visit http://sciencewatch.com/ana/st/hadron/institutions
About Stony Brook UniversityPart of the State University of New York system, Stony Brook University encompasses 200 buildings on 1,450 acres. In the 53 years since its founding, the University has grown tremendously, now with nearly 25,000 students and 2,200 faculty and is recognized as one of the nation’s important centers of learning and scholarship. It is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, and ranks among the top 100 national universities in America and among the top 50 public national universities in the country according to the 2010 U.S. News & World Report survey. Stony Brook University co-manages Brookhaven National Laboratory, joining an elite group of universities, including Berkeley, University of Chicago, Cornell, MIT, and Princeton that run federal research and development laboratories. SBU is a driving force of the Long Island economy, with an annual economic impact of $4.65 billion, generating nearly 60,000 jobs, and accounts for nearly 4% of all economic activity in Nassau and Suffolk counties, and roughly 7.5 percent of total jobs in Suffolk County.
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