Honoring a Career of Outstanding Achievement

Newswise — NEWPORT NEWS, VA – This year, the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility celebrates the 40th anniversary of its founding to probe the secrets of the subatomic universe. And for 39 of those years, esteemed physicist Volker D. Burkert has been an important part of its mission.

Now, Burkert is being honored for his contributions to advancements in experimental physics with the prestigious Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics. The citation reads: “For exemplary leadership in the development of high-performance instrumentation for large acceptance spectrometers that have enabled breakthroughs in fundamental nuclear physics through electroproduction measurements of exclusive processes."

The Bonner Prize has been awarded each year since 1964 by the American Physical Society’s (APS) Division of Nuclear Physics as its highest honor to recognize outstanding experimental research in nuclear physics.

For Burkert, this includes serving as group leader of Jefferson Lab’s Experimental Hall B and shaping its physics program for years, as well as developing the concept of the high-precision detector package for the lab’s powerful Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). He was also involved in the construction and operation of this detector — the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer, or CLAS — and later he led the conceptual design of the CLAS12 that was constructed for the upgraded CEBAF. CEBAF is a DOE Office of Science user facility that currently supports the research of more than 1,900 nuclear physicists worldwide.

“Naturally, I am thrilled about receiving the award, though mindful that, while individual initiative is important, it is also an award that honors the science achievements of the research teams and of Jefferson Lab’s discoveries in nuclear science,” Burkert said. “None of this would have been possible without the generous funding of cutting-edge science by the U.S. Department of Energy.”

The prize will be officially presented at a future APS meeting and includes an award of $10,000 and a certificate citing a recipient’s scientific contributions.

‘Something we didn’t know before’

Originally from the town of Ellwangen in southern Germany, Burkert got his first taste for experimental physics while in high school.

“For me, the fascinating aspect of experimental physics is that we can set up some simple experiment, we can predict the results considering the underlying laws of physics and, if we did everything right, we get the results we had predicted,” he said. “That means our experimental apparatus is correctly constructed and, knowing this, we can use it in experiments to study phenomena whose origin we a priori didn’t know, and we have some confidence that the new things we observe are real and tell us something new about nature we didn’t know before.”

In 1975, Burkert earned his doctorate from the University of Bonn, where he was also a research associate and assistant professor. From 1980-82, he was a scientific associate at CERN in Switzerland on a research project that resulted in the first direct determination of the gluon structure function of the proton.

He first came to Jefferson Lab — then known as CEBAF — in 1985 for a summer workshop on defining the scope of the CEBAF science program. By November, he was a staff scientist helping to shape the future of the nascent national lab. 

The facility had already developed the concept of a Large Acceptance Spectrometer (LAS) for photonuclear physics with a real photon beam, but there was a strong desire to develop it into a detector that could also accommodate experiments with an intense electron beam. Burkert already had experience in this area from his doctoral project, so he took on the challenge to lead the design and construction of the necessary additional detector systems.

In 2003, Burkert was appointed Hall B group leader, overseeing a team of physicists, engineers and technicians on a research program focused on the study of the structure of protons, neutrons and nuclei using high-energy electron and photon beams, polarized and unpolarized hydrogen and deuterium targets with the CLAS system.

For his CLAS research, Burkert initiated the N* program that included the search for the “missing” excited states of the proton, predicted by quark theory, and reveal their internal structures, toward the goal of fostering a better understanding of a critical phase of the evolution of the universe. 

One key discovery from CLAS data came in collaboration with colleagues Latifa Elouadrhiri and Francois-Xavier Girod. The three used published electron scattering data from CLAS and analyzed the data in a way that connected them to mechanical properties of the proton, in particular the physical pressure distribution.

“The stunning results showed that the peak pressure inside the proton exceeded the estimated pressure in the most densely packed known objects in the universe — the cores of neutron stars,” Burkert said. “These results became an unexpected revelation to the nuclear physics community and were discussed in multiple news outlets and the international press.”

Their breakthrough findings were published in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature.

Studying a microsecond moment

Among his other honors, Burkert was elected an APS Fellow in 2004. He received the Commonwealth of Virginia Outstanding Scientist Award in 2019, in part for his leadership in expanding the CLAS detector’s capabilities. That year, he stepped down as hall leader and became a principal staff scientist in Jefferson Lab’s Experimental Nuclear Physics division. 

Since 2020, he has been on the leadership team of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a next-generation particle accelerator that DOE is building at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York in partnership with Jefferson Lab. The EIC is designed to investigate gluons — the force-carrying particles behind the strong force that “glues” the building blocks of matter together.

Burkert has been a key player in Jefferson Lab’s history of furthering our understanding of the creation and tantalizing mysteries of the universe.

“The science that is being done at Jefferson Lab is largely related to the physics of the strong interaction, or hadron physics,” he said. “Everything related to the strong interaction happened in the history of the universe just microseconds after the Big Bang when the strong interaction became manifest and the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen atoms, was formed and remained the only stable matter particle to this day. 

“In the transition from the state of the universe as a ‘soup’ of quarks and gluons, called the quark-gluon plasma, to the proton, the football stadium-size universe was filled with all the extremely short-lived excited baryon and meson resonances that we now explore and discover at Jefferson Lab energies as well in other accelerator facilities at higher energies.

“Exciting these states now in isolation enables physicists to understand the processes that occurred 14 billion years earlier in this microsecond moment. Including all the excited hadrons discovered during the past 70 years enabled physicists to develop models that provide insight into the very fast but smooth transition of the early universe from the quark-gluon phase to the hadron phase.”

Burkert is author and co-author of more than 375 articles published in first-tier journals. In 2022, he was part of the editorial team that generated the volume “50 Years of Quantum-Chromodynamics.”

Further Reading
Volker Burkert Named Virginia Outstanding Scientist
Quarks Feel the Pressure in the Proton
Volker Burkert, Ph.D., 2019 Virginia’s Outstanding Scientist
Hall B Scientific Staff Bios – Volker D. Burkert

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