Jesus Perez Rios Wins NSF CAREER Award for Few-Body Physics Research

Jesus Perez Rios, an assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Physics and Astronomy, has received the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project, "Few-Body Processes Including Ions, Atoms and Molecules: From Plasma Physics to Cold Chemistry."

The award of $667,308 for five years will fund a project that aims to develop a general theoretical framework for treating three-body recombination processes and more general third-order chemical reactions, with applications ranging from cold chemistry to plasma physics, spanning temperatures from near absolute zero to the Sun's temperature.

"Our findings and models will have an impact in a multitude of fields in physics and chemistry, including chemical physics, atmospheric physics, spectroscopy, and plasma physics, to name a few," said Rios.

On the educational front, this proposal focuses on teaching a new course dedicated to explaining the professional routes that physics offers nowadays. This is an effort to emphasize the relevance of STEM, and physics in particular, in welfare and human prosperity.

"At this time of uncertainties and cuts in federal funding, it is exceptionally heartwarming to hear Jesus receiving an NSF Early CAREER award, a defining moment of any junior faculty's career as it represents highly selective recognition of not only the recipient's accomplishments but also future potential," said Chang Kee Jung, distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. "Jesus's research is interdisciplinary by nature and its vision has a broader horizon than usual. Jesus is dedicated to undergraduate education and early research involvements, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy is blessed to have Jesus as well as other fantastic junior faculty members."

Few-body physics is the branch of physics dedicated to the study of the interaction and dynamics of physical systems with few degrees of freedom at some energy scale. One of the most relevant few-body processes is three-body recombination, by which three reactants collide to form a bound state between two of them, while the third carries the excess energy away. Three-body recombination plays a significant role in various physical and chemical scenarios, such as ozone formation, which is crucial for sustaining life on Earth, or the stability of ions in contact with an ultracold gas of neutrals, even down to temperatures close to absolute zero.

Rios joined Stony Brook University in early 2022. He has authored a book, "An Introduction to Cold and Ultracold Chemistry: Atoms, Molecules, Ions and Rydbergs," published by Springer in 2020. Rios is also an editorial board member of the Few-Body Systems journal and one of the leading editors of the Cambridge Elements in Physics beyond the Standard Model with Atomic and Molecular Systems.

The Perez Rios research group studies fundamental processes involving atoms and molecules relevant to different disciplines of physics and chemistry, such as cold and ultracold chemistry, chemical physics, condensed matter physics, atmospheric physics, plasma physics, and physics beyond the Standard Model. The essential toolkit counts on analytical and computational techniques and data science. The research philosophy of the group relies on the belief that studying different scenarios in one field of science might bring tools and ideas helpful to the rest.

The NSF CAREER Award is among the most prestigious honors for early-career faculty in the United States. It supports researchers who demonstrate the potential to become academic role models in both research and education, and who are poised to lead advances in their disciplines. The award is intended to help build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.