Contact:	Bob Nelson						For immediate release
		(212) 854-6580					April 21, 1998
		rjn2@columbia.edu



T.D. Lee, Columbia Physicist and Nobel Laureate,
To Head New Physics Center at Brookhaven


	T.D. Lee, University Professor at Columbia University and Nobel Prize 
laureate in physics, has been named to head the new RIKEN BNL Research 
Center at Brookhaven National Laboratories.
	The facility was established last fall with a $2 million grant from the 
Institute for Physical and Chemical Research, near Tokyo, a government-funded, 
multidisciplinary research organization known by its Japanese acronym, 
RIKEN.  
	The funding, expected to grow in future years, will allow scientists to study 
both quantum chromodynamics, the study of quarks and gluons, and spin physics 
at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a particle accelerator at Brookhaven that is 
to be completed in 1999.  The collider will accelerate ions of such heavy elements 
as gold to speeds near that of light, then smash them together to recreate 
conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang.  The information could 
ultimately provide concepts linking Einstein's relativity to quantum mechanics.
	"The progress of physics depends on young physicists opening up new 
frontiers," said Professor Lee, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1957.  "The RIKEN 
BNL Research Center will be dedicated to the nurturing of a new generation of 
scientists who can meet the challenge that will be created by the Relativistic Heavy 
Ion Collider."
	Each of the elementary particles found in nature posses a unique value of
spin, as well as values of mass and electric charge.  Spin in the intrinsic angular 
momentum of elementary particles and nuclei.  When spins are aligned in the 
same direction, the beam of particles is considered spin-polarized.  Scientists at 
Brookhaven hope to further understand this property of matter by colliding spin-
polarized beams of matter.  For example, the subunits of protons and neutrons, 
called quarks and gluons, possess spin values of 1/2 and 1 respectively, and 
organize themselves into nucleons, each with a total spin value of 1/2, in a way 
still not clearly understood.
	A group of physics faculty from Columbia, led by Norman Christ and 
Robert Mawhinney, is constructing the 600-gigaflop supercomputer to be used at 
the new center to simulate heavy ion collisions and their results.  That machine is 
due to be completed in May and, run in tandem with Columbia's own 400-gigaflop 
computer, will provide 1.0 teraflops of computing power.

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