Todd Kempel Profile

From the Iowa State Daily: Todd Kempel Profile

By Amelia Johnson, amelia.johnson@iowastatedaily.com TownNews.com

The J/Psi meson is a bit of an unusual thing in the physics world and understanding how it works could influence physics.

“It’s a very important piece for understanding a very complicated puzzle,” said John Lajoie, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy.

“We want to figure out how they are created, and how they are bound. If we can figure that out, we can start to understand how other particles, like the proton, are bound,” said Todd Kempel, an alumni ISU Ph.D. student.

Kempel, who graduated in 2010, won the 2011 Brookhaven National Laboratory RHIC and AGS Thesis Award for his thesis paper, “Understanding the J/Psi meson Production Mechanism at PHENIX.”

For his work, Kempel received an award of $3,000.

“When I started my Ph.D. program, I had no idea what I wanted to do in physics,” Kempel said.

While in the Ph. D. program, Kempel joined the Experimental Nuclear Physics group. This group worked with the RHIC experiment. PHENIX, or Pioneering High Energy Ion Experiment, is the experiment and RHIC is the accelerator. The ISU Experimental Nuclear Physics group is still a major player in PHENIX.

Within that group, Kempel worked with Lajoie, his eventual thesis adviser, on making, developing, designing and testing prototype trigger modules for the experiment.

“He did the hardware design, the software design in the hardware, the whole kit and kaboodle,” Lajoie said.

It was not until later, after hearing much about it, that Kempel decided to work in nuclear physics and eventually to study the J/psi meson.

“The problem itself was interesting. People have been trying to solve this problem since the ‘70s. There still wasn’t any satisfactory answer,” Kempel said.

However, the award wasn’t the goal of Kempel’s work. “It was a bit of an afterthought. My adviser suggested entering the program; so I did,” he said.

“It was a fantastic physics result. It was a solid piece of science. The way he wrote the thesis, everything from his style of writing to the presentation of the material was very clear, very complete. Good science, good thesis, there was no way he could lose,” Lajoie said.

Although Kempel worked in nuclear physics and won an award for his work, he has since moved out of that field. He now works with software, specifically software that controls electronic hardware, something that he also spent a great deal of time on at ISU.

Asked which work Kempel preferred, he said “I liked being able to switch between the two.”