James Dunlop

Upton, N.Y.

Age: 39

Years on Job: 8

James Dunlop re-creates the big bang. At Brookhaven National Laboratory, he uses the electric fields of a particle accelerator to speed up gold nuclei racing around a 2.4-mile-long track. When the nuclei, guided by the accelerator's powerful magnets, reach 99.9995 percent of the speed of light, Dunlop makes them collide. Each 4 trillion degree Celsius crash shatters the gold particles into quarks and gluons, the tiniest building blocks of a proton. The accelerator's STAR detector, above, photographs the atomic bits and pieces, allowing him to study matter at its most fundamental level. It's not just a desk job, either. "There's also a component when you're going out to the detector with a soldering iron or a roll of duct tape," Dunlop says. "You've just got to make it work."

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What Dunlop Studies:



Quark–Gluon Plasma


String Theory

String theory, which claims the universe is made of tiny vibrating strings and multiple dimensions, is said to be impossible to confirm. But Dunlop's team put the theory's predictions to the test when they created the quark–gluon plasma. While standard theories stated the plasma would be gas-like, string theory calculated it would be a slippery fluid. ­Dunlop is now pitting the theories against one another for a rematch, this time investigating how a quark slows down as it passes through the plasma.

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