Klaus Dehmelt

Research Group Website

Biography:

Dr. Klaus Dehmelt began his research career in 1999 after receiving his M.Sc., working with the HERA-B collaboration at the German National Accelerator Lab DESY on gas detector development. He then joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where he continued work on gas detectors with the COMPASS collaboration. In 2002, he returned to graduate school and became part of the PHENIX collaboration as a graduate student at Florida Tech two years later. After earning his Ph.D., he returned to DESY as a postdoctoral researcher with the LCTPC collaboration. In 2011, he joined Stony Brook University as a research scientist in the Relativistic Heavy Ion (RHI) group. In 2014, he served as run coordinator for the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

 

Currently, Dr. Dehmelt is a Staff Scientist at Jefferson Lab, contributing to the MOLLER and SoLID experiments, while also holding the position of Research Professor at Stony Brook University. He maintains a close collaboration with the Nuclear Physics group at Stony Brook through their shared involvement in these key projects.

 

Research Statement:

One of my central scientific interests is understanding the origin of mass in the visible universe. While the Higgs mechanism explains the mass of elementary particles such as quarks, it accounts for only a small fraction—about 1–2%—of the mass of protons and neutrons. The bulk of nucleon mass arises dynamically from the complex interactions of confined quarks and gluons. This phenomenon, known as **Emergent Hadron Mass (EHM)**, stems from the kinetic energy of quarks and the intense gluon fields that bind them. Investigating EHM is a cornerstone objective of the SoLID experiment at Jefferson Lab and a central focus of my current research.