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Barbara Erazmus

Investigative Physicist

Erazmus

© N. Tiget/CNRS Photothèque

That she should have such a European last name seems utterly appropriate.1 Barbara Erazmus is of Polish origin and works as a specialist in nuclear physics at CNRS. Having lived in France for twenty-two years now, she is also perfectly comfortable speaking English and Russian. But all of that just constitutes auxiliary details to the main dimension of her life's work. “I am a member of a scientific community, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (IN2P3), which is multinational in its organizational culture. Our experiments, on the subatomic scale of atomic cores and their constituents of elementary particles,2 require facilities on a global scale. We have all learned how to work on a project basis. I had an opportunity doing this in 1996 when I coordinated the design of new-generation silicon detectors to outfit the Star experiment3 for Rhic4 at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States. But adapting the work of scientists from several countries to accommodate the demands of industry was not so easy. We push our industry contacts to make technological leaps, but sometimes they abandon us halfway through the process! Participating in the experimental program of Rhic,” Erazmus proudly continues, “allowed us to then reconstitute a plasma of quarks and gluons, a state of matter unknown on Earth but which existed at the creation of the Universe, just after the Big Bang. We were expecting matter with weakly linked particles, but this plasma behaves like a very dense fluid.”

Since September 2005, Barbara Erazmus has been dividing her time between the Institute's Parisian headquarters, where she is program director for Hadron physics,5 and her research lab in Nantes, the Laboratory of Subatomic Physics and Associated Technologies (Subatech).6 Appointed in 1988, following the completion of her thesis and successful application to CNRS for a permanent position, she has never left. She became research director in 1998 and worked for three years as deputy director. A path of logical steps that fits with her vocation: investigation.

“Growing up, I hesitated between journalism and physics. In Glucholazy where I lived, I was ultimately influenced by the efforts of a physics teacher who bent the rules of the high school program to make it come to life. He covered everything that was still mysterious. There were no physicists around me, but I found ways to reach my objectives: by increasing the number of encounters, you help destiny!” During a stay in France, while studying general relativity in Lódz, she followed a sign in Annecy that read “Particle Physics Laboratory.” Many good encounters followed  but above all was her discovery of... Cern! She returned to Poland with a goal. Even though her French textbook was entitled “One day I will go to Paris,” she finally moved to Caen at age twenty-four. She switched track to nuclear physics, believing there would be more jobs in that field with the construction of the National Heavy Ion Accelerator (Ganil). And while France is now her scientific home, she can't help noticing some differences between the two places she's lived. “I was surprised by the lack of emphasis on sciences at school in France. In Poland, we study physics in all grades, and we also start doing chemistry and natural science experiments at a very early age. Here, I must explain to my children the laws of electromagnetism, how electric current works, etc. Their curiosity is not stimulated. In the end, the basic principles for understanding natural phenomena are lacking. Without that, how can we ask the right questions?” she wonders.

 

Magali Sarazin

Notes :

1. The humanist Erasmus (1466-1536) of Rotterdam believed in the idea of a united Europe.
2. An atom is composed of an atomic core and electrons which gravitate around it. The core is made of protons and neutrons, which are in turn composed of three quarks each.
3. Solenoidal Tracker at Rhic, heavy ion collider.
4. Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider: www.bnl.gov/rhic/
5. Quarks cannot subsist in an isolated state but only when linked to each other by strong interactions. They thus form hadrons.
6. Laboratoire de physique subatomique et des technologies associées (CNRS / Université de Nantes / Ecole des mines de Nantes joint lab).


Contacts :

Barbara Erazmus
Subatech, Nantes.
barbara.erazmus@subatech.in2p3.fr

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