Professor Timothy Chupp has been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Fellows are selected from active members of AAAS who have advanced science or its applications in areas including research, teaching, service, and public outreach. Professor Chupp was recognized “for pioneering development of noble-gas nuclear polarization techniques and applications to investigations of the structure of the neutron, precision NMR measurements, tests of the fundamental laws of elementary particle interactions, polarization of neutrons and neutron decay.”

Throughout his career, Professor Chupp has pursued experiments that reveal the nature of elementary particles and the forces between them using hybrid techniques of atomic and nuclear physics. The key tool developed by Professor Chupp with his students and collaborators has been control of the spin or polarization of atoms, their nuclei, and neutrons, using laser techniques. With this special handle on atoms, precision measurements of particle momentum or energy levels are used to study physics beyond the Standard Model. The Standard Model is the current theory describing interactions between fundamental particles - electrons and quarks - in the universe. However, some inconsistencies in the Standard Model suggest that there might be new physics that cannot be described by this theory. Currently, his team of five graduate students, six undergraduates and postdoctoral researchers are involved in three inter-related projects: measuring the magnetic moment anomaly g-2 of the muon, studying the decay properties of the neutron, and measuring the stretching of the 129Xe atom and neutron along their spin axes, a property called the electric dipole moment or EDM.