From August 2008 to July 2009 I spent a year on sabbatical at Brookhaven National Laboratory.  During that time I worked on a variety of projects within the PHENIX Experiment on the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL.  Primarily I focused on the success of the ninth data run at RHIC ("Run 9") which was devoted to collisions of spin-polarized protons at center-of-mass energies of 200 and 500 GeV. Run 9 lasted from February to July 2009.  The primary physics goal of these collisions is to understand how the constituents of the proton, the quarks and gluons in our standard model of the strong interaction, conspire to create a proton wave function with a total angular momentum of 1/2 h-bar; this simple question continues to defy easy explanation.  One of the interesting things we did this year, for the first time at BNL, was to observe the production of the charged W bosons that mediate the weak interaction, the production rate of the W is intimately connected with the spin structure of the proton.

But I did not go to Long Island by myself! I brought along my wife Elizabeth Horodowich, a professor in the NMSU History Department, and our son Louis, 4 years old when we arrived there.  Liz was also on sabbatical, and she completed and published a book, "A Brief History of Venice" which you can buy on Amazon along with her other book, "Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice".  I'll describe the many good times Liz and Louis and I had on Long Island when were weren't busy writing books and destroying protons.