Breese Quinn, University of Mississippi professor of physics and astronomy and director of the UM Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics (UMCMA), was announced as a recipient of the APS (American Physical Society) Fellowship on Friday, Oct. 10.
APS is a nonprofit scientific society of more than 50,000 physicists, and the fellowship is an award honoring achievements in physics and recognizing efforts in the greater physics community. Other than Quinn, 150 other winners were announced on the same day.
Quinn’s listing on the fellowship’s website says that Quinn was chosen for his “tireless advocacy on behalf of the U.S. high energy physics community, including leadership in building support for physics funding through personal and community outreach to Congressional delegations and appropriations staff.”
In an interview with The Daily Mississippian, Quinn elaborated on his field of work and the importance of continuing research in it.
“This field…(tries) to determine what are the most basic fundamental building blocks of the universe and how they all interact with each other to form everything that we see around us,” Quinn said. “You know, just little questions like that. That’s the kind of cool stuff we get to do every day.”
For Quinn, the spirit of discovery is a core tenet of American society.
“There is value in (the) discovery of learning what our universe is, how it works, what our place is in it, and how we interact with it to have better lives,” Quinn said. “The quest for discovery and learning and understanding is something intrinsic to us as a people, I think, particularly in this nation.”
Quinn was nominated by Kevin Beach, chair and associate professor of physics and astronomy at UM, along with Harvey Newman, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology.
In a statement in a university press release, Beach further detailed Quinn’s work with Congress.
“He’s been a huge advocate for the high energy physics community,” Beach said. “He’s spent years meeting with House and Senate appropriations staff and politicians, making the case for American high energy physics. … He’s widely recognized as the key person who’s carried that burden.”
Quinn estimates that he has made more than 900 visits to offices of members of Congress since he started his efforts in 2005. Since then, he has only been more emboldened to help in the political realm.
“There has never been anywhere on the face of the planet or any time in history that normal people have had that kind of opportunity to interact with the 535 most powerful people in the world — no one else gets to do this,” Quinn said. “There’s nowhere else that anybody can just get on the phone, call one of these folks that are running the most powerful country in the world and say, ‘Hey, I’d like to drop by and talk to you about why I think we ought to fund this.’ And not only will they say, ‘Yeah, come on in, let’s talk,’ but they want you to. That’s the way it’s designed to work.”
For Beach, nominating Quinn just made sense.
“It seemed like the logical next step was to make sure he was recognized at the national level,” Beach said in the press release. “In our discipline, one of the biggest accolades is being named a fellow of the American Physical Society, and it’s extremely competitive.”
In addition to his congressional advocacy, Quinn’s work in high energy physics, such as his studies with subatomic particles like muons and quarks, has been recognized.
Quinn’s team was awarded the 2019 European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize for the 1995 discovery of the top quark, which was the last discovered quark of the six theorized.
In 2024, Quinn became the first Mississippian to serve in the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, a joint charter between the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. The panel advises the federal government on the nation’s high energy physics programs.
Earlier this year, Quinn was bestowed the university’s Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award, an award meant to honor a faculty member who achieved national or international recognition for their work.
Quinn’s newest project is the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a Fermilab-sponsored experiment which will observe neutrinos and their role in the universe.
Neutrinos are neutrally-charged subatomic particles, which pass through matter without interacting with them.
“You have about a trillion of them going through your body every second. And maybe once in your entire lifetime will any of those ever interact with you,” Quinn said. “But they’re very important for us to understand how the universe works. And so, (in) this experiment, I’m particularly going to be looking at neutrinos coming from supernova explosions from deep space.”
The experiment will be conducted between detectors established at Fermilab and the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, S. D. Beams of trillions of neutrinos will be fired from Fermilab to the South Dakota facility.
“We are going to make a neutrino beam at Fermilab, and then we’re going to shoot that neutrino beam 800 miles through the crust of the earth to South Dakota,” Quinn said “You don’t need a beam pipe because it just goes right through the rock. And so we sent it 800 miles through the rock, through the crust of the earth to South Dakota.”
The experiment aims to examine the different types of neutrinos– the electron neutrino, muon neutrino and the tau neutrino.
“We’ve observed all three types. And when they go through material, even though they don’t get stopped by the material, they will spontaneously change from one type into another,” Quinn said. “It’s like if you went to Baskin-Robbins and got a vanilla ice cream cone, and you go walking down the street with it, and after you walk a block, it’s changed into chocolate. You walk another block, it’s changed into strawberry. You walk another block, and it’s back to vanilla again. That’s what these do. It’s just weird quantum physics.”
Ultimately, research from this experiment will help answer bigger questions about the universe.
“Basic physics would have said (during the Big Bang) there would have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter produced. But if that was true, it would have all annihilated each other and there’d be nothing left in the universe except just low-level background radiation. No matter, no planets, no galaxies, no people, nothing,” Quinn said. “Thankfully, that’s not the way the universe works. There’s a little imbalance, and matter is preferred a little bit more over antimatter in our universe. We don’t know why. And we think these neutrino oscillations have something to do with it. So we want to measure that (change) back and forth as precisely as we can.”
The award is a full-circle moment for Quinn. In 1987, he visited Fermilab as part of a national program, which sent distinguished high school students to national laboratories across the country.
“(In) the mornings we got lectures by folks like Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, who was the director of the lab at the time. And then in the afternoons, they would send us out in pairs to the different experiments at the lab to get hands-on experience, as much as a high school student could get at one of those labs,” Quinn said.
For Quinn, this experience solidified his passion for physics.
“Being there on that site at Fermilab and those experiments and that big science, you know, at the end of those two weeks, it was like, yeah, this is what we’re going to be doing for our career,” Quinn said. “And so that pretty much sold it. Since that point, I have worked at Fermilab since 1987, almost continuously.”
