Findings
Safety
Everywhere
A new fieldwork safety initiative at UNH aims to protect researchers from perils they may encounter in remote, sometimes rugged fieldwork sites — and from interpersonal hazards that can derail careers. Led by UNH’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety, the project emerged from a growing recognition across campus and by leadership for intensified focus on safety in the field, as well as from the National Science Foundation-funded Unlearning Racism in the Geosciences, or URGE, effort at UNH.
Sophie Burke, research fieldwork safety coordinator (also a postdoctoral researcher in the Earth Systems Research Center), notes that research fieldwork has moved beyond “the Indiana Jones trope.” This project expands the notion of what’s risky or safe to include the perspectives of all members of an increasingly diverse community of researchers.
And the initiative doesn’t just consider physical safety. It’s engaged UNH’s renowned Prevention Innovations Research Center (PIRC) to develop trainings that focus on interpersonal violence prevention. As universities nationwide develop fieldwork safety plans, in part responding to new requirements from federal funding agencies, PIRC’s involvement distinguishes UNH’s initiative. Jane Stapleton, executive director of practice at PIRC, co-leads the project with Burke.
“We’re creating this multi-pronged approach to providing researchers with the resources they need to develop safe and inclusive fieldwork campaigns,” says Burke. “Our hope with this program is to take it beyond that physical lens and broaden it to include those interpersonal perspectives to allow for the program to have a holistic approach to safety.”
Beth Potier
testing a
fundamental
force
New research from a team of physicists led by UNH significantly advances our understanding of how protons, which comprise 95% of the universe, interact with each other. The results, published in the journal Nature Physics, provide a benchmark for testing the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces in nature.
“There’s a lot still unanswered about both of those things, the proton and the strong force,” says lead author David Ruth ’22G, a Ph.D. candidate at UNH when he did the research. “This brings us a little bit closer to that understanding. It’s a necessary piece of two very fundamental things in the universe.”
The strong force governs how what’s internal to the atom’s nucleus — neutrons, protons and the quarks and gluons that make them up — bind together. It is the least understood of the four fundamental forces of nature, which include gravity, electromagnetism and the weak force.
“If we really want to understand our world, we have to have a solid theory of that force,” says professor of physics Karl Slifer, Ruth’s advisor and a lead collaborator on the study.
The researchers tested two state-of-the-art, competing theoretical calculations of the strong force with an experiment probing the spin of the protons in a regime, or mode of operating, where the quarks that comprise them are at a great distance from each other. Their experimental findings agreed with one of the calculations but not the other.
“Because these calculations are very complex, each theory group makes different choices about how to do them,” Ruth says about the discrepancy. “If we’re going to understand the strong force, we need to know which one is right, which one is wrong.”
Beth Potier