Alice Mignerey

Professor Alice Mignerey is a Nuclear Chemist with research programs in basic nuclear science and in applications of the nuclear analytical technique of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) to environmental problems.
Professor Mignerey's basic nuclear research is focused on understanding the behavior of nuclear matter under conditions of extreme density (pressure) and temperature. These conditions are postulated to have existed just after the Big Bang, when the protons and neutrons had not yet formed from their constituent quarks and the gluons which hold them together. This so-called quark-gluon plasma has been predicted to be accessible through heavy-ion reactions at high energies. The experimental program is centered at the Brookhaven National Laboratory RHIC accelerator where colliding beams of nuclei reach center-of-mass energies of 200 AGeV, producing conditions mimicking those of the early universe. Prof. Mignerey is a member of the PHOBOS Collaboration at RHIC. See the PHOBOS web site at http://www.phobos.bnl.gov for details on the goals of the PHOBOS experiment and a full list of publications.

The research program in AMS has concentrated on the uses of the cosmogenic nuclides, such as C-14 and Cl-36, to study ground-water and soil systems. Technique development is currently being carried out with researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory Trace Element AMS facility (TEAMS) to allow dating separate organic fractions in the organic C-14 carbon pool.