Joseph (Jo) Moscoso is one of the 62 graduate students nationwide selected for the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2024 Solicitation 1 cycle. Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE National Laboratories, SCGSR allows graduate students to conduct part of their graduate thesis research in collaboration with a DOE laboratory scientist. Jo will be working with Berkeley lab scientist Dr. André Walker-Loud and UC Berkeley Professor Raul Briceño!
Jo is a PhD candidate in the department of Physics and Astronomy working in Professor Amy Nicholson’s theoretical nuclear physics group. The group investigates how fundamental strongly interacting particles combine to become all of the matter that we observe. Through the use of computational methods and theoretical tools, calculations of properties of hadronic systems can be performed directly from the fundamental forces that govern the universe. These calculations are required to understand the majority of hadrons observed in nature, which exist in unstable states and decay at timescales of 10e-23 seconds, as well as the interactions between the strong, electromagnetic, and weak forces that occur in nuclear reactions.
Jo’s proposed research will be to improve the understanding of the interaction between nucleons, protons and neutrons, directly from the standard model of particle physics. This includes calculations of the two-nucleon system, which includes the deuteron, the lightest stable bound nuclear system, as well as the interaction of nucleons with the electroweak forces. A better understanding of nuclear interactions will enhance the discovery potential of experiments using nuclei as probes for new physics that could explain, for example, the abundance of matter over antimatter in the Universe.
For more information on the SCGSR program, visit: https://science.osti.gov/wdts/scgsr.