William & Mary’s Jozef Dudek, Margaret Hamilton Associate Professor of Physics, has been named a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

Founded in 1899, the APS is a non-profit professional organization of approximately 53,000 physicists from academia, industry and national laboratories. Elevation to fellowship is in recognition of exceptional contributions to the field of physics, and no more than 0.5% of members are named fellows of the organization each year.

Dudek’s fellowship raises the number of APS Fellows within the W&M physics department to eight. The others are David S. Armstrong, Christopher D. Carone, Irina Novikova, Kostas Orginos, Jianwei Qiu, Marc T. Sher and Patricia Vahle.

The high proportion of APS Fellows within the W&M physics faculty accentuates the excellence of the department and highlights the promise of W&M’s new School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics.

Dudek was elevated to APS Fellow “for contributions to the spectroscopy of hadrons under the strong nuclear force and their impact on experimental programs worldwide.” He holds a joint appointment between W&M and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, a United States Department of Energy nuclear physics research facility, and was one of four members of the lab to receive the honor this year.

“Our staff power the science and innovation that are continuing to move the discipline of physics and this laboratory into the future,” said Jefferson Lab Director Kimberly Sawyer in a press release. “We’re very proud that the accomplishments and contributions of these four Jefferson Lab staff members to the field of physics are being recognized by their peers with this honor.”

Hadron spectroscopy is a subfield of nuclear and particle physics. Dudek’s work seeks to understand how quarks and gluons combine to form hadrons, which are subatomic particles composed of two or more quarks held together by the strong nuclear force.

The familiar protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus are examples of hadrons, but Dudek studies the wide array of unstable hadrons that can be made in accelerator experiments.

“Hadron spectroscopy is primarily about categorizing which hadrons exist,” said Dudek, “and then seeking to understand why that set of hadrons exists. Starting from the quark and gluon theory, we try to understand why a particular set exists with the masses and properties that it has, rather than a different set.”

Dudek explained that he studies the full spectrum of subatomic particles that feel the strong nuclear force, and he uses first principles methods that don’t rely upon uncontrolled theoretical approximations or guesses as to how the theory might behave.

“In particular, my focus lies on attempts to describe the excited spectrum of hadrons using first principles approaches to the underlying theory known as Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), which describes the interactions of quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of hadrons,” he said. 

Dudek’s work focuses on lattice QCD, a numerical approach that uses supercomputers like those at the Jefferson Lab. 

“One of the things that’s unusual about my position is that I’m a jointly appointed faculty member here at W&M, but I’m also on the staff at Jefferson Lab,” he said, “and that has a number of advantages, in that it really puts me right there in the middle of the experimental activity.”

He explained that most of his efforts since 2004 have focused on developing and applying techniques within lattice QCD to study previously unexplored areas of hadron spectroscopy. The work is a team effort that includes collaborations with students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty and Jefferson Lab staff.

“Our work is to set up calculations,” he said, “We then figure out how to put them into the computer, run the computer and collect theoretical data.”

Analyzing theoretical data is much like analyzing experimental data, Dudek explained, and the results provide insights that sharpen the overall picture of fundamental physics.

“It’s about understanding how the universe works,” he said. “It’s an intellectual challenge.”

One area of Dudek’s research involves shedding light on the possible role of “hybrid hadrons” in the spectrum. This type of particle forms when an excited gluonic field plays an essential structural role alongside the quarks involved.

He noted that it has been challenging to pin down these hybrids in experiments and to accurately create theoretical models of them, but he was able to perform calculations that exposed the spectrum and decays of hybrids within lattice QCD, thus providing the first accurate QCD predictions of their properties.

Dudek’s recent work entails treating excited hadrons as they naturally occur: as short-lived resonances that can decay into several possible final states which can be detected experimentally. He has pioneered efforts to study this physics in lattice QCD and has provided the first reliable information within QCD about several low-lying resonances in the light-quark and charmonium sectors accessible in experiments at Jefferson Lab and other international facilities.

These are just a few examples of research that Dudek has performed over the past two decades, and he’s quick to note that his achievements are not solitary endeavors.

“I would like to point out that this award is not for me in isolation,” said Dudek. “Almost all of the work that I’ve done has been with collaborators, and I’ve had some extremely good ones: students, postdocs and my senior colleagues. These things are always team efforts.”