Dr. Neil Russell - Physics

Neil Russell has been an active member of the NMU research community for some time.  Most recently, he was selected as a NMU Peter White Scholar in 2005.  Below, Dr. Russell describes his interests in his own words...

I am interested in testing Relativity. A little background: Special and General Relativity, two of Einstein’s great contributions to science, are foundations of modern physics. Over many years, experiments have verified predictions of these theories with great precision. As experiments continue to reach even higher precisions, there is a possibility that discrepancies could be found between experimental results and the predictions of Relativity. If this were to happen, modifications in the theories would need to be found to address the discrepancies. This process of updating the theory to fit the data is of course the basic idea of the ‘Scientific Method.’ In the last decade, interest in testing relativity has grown rapidly due to the creation of a framework that describes all possible Relativity deviations, known as the Standard-Model Extension, or SME. Using the SME, we can do calculations to predict what the tell-tale signals of these deviations might look like in specific experiments. Experimentalists can then try to find those hypothetical signals in the lab. To read more about this, see the web site maintained by the theory group at Indiana University, where the SME was developed: http://physics.indiana.edu/~kostelec/faq.html .I have done calculations using the SME for several types of experiments, including ones involving atomic clocks, masers, antihydrogen, and a device known as the Penning trap. For more information, see my research page http://physics2.nmu.edu/~nrussell/research.htm . I am currently working on some related ideas to understand how the SME could affect the motion of particles. Potentially, this work could help physicists in the effort to find a single ‘Unified Theory.’ One of the big goals of theorists is to describe, in one theory, the microscopic world of particle physics and the large-scale world of galaxies and the universe. If relativity deviations are found, the new information obtained may provide the key to finding such a Unified Theory.