Prof. Murray Moinester works in the fields of hadron structure and spectroscopy, archaeology, environmental radioactivity, and climate engineering. Participates in Fermilab SELEX and CERN COMPASS collaboration studies of pion polarizability, gluon polarization in nucleons, flavor decomposition of the nucleon spin, search for exotic states, light meson spectroscopy, nuclear dependence of charm production, and kaon Bose–Einstein correlations. His archaeology studies involve multispectral imaging of ostraca and ceramics rehydroxylation studies for scientific dating. Environmental studies deal with the health impact of radioactivity in phosphate fertilizers and its phosphogypsum byproduct, and radon diffusion measurements. Climate studies involve the sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Research achievements include: leading the effort to achieve a pion polarizability measurement at CERN COMPASS to provide an important test of chiral perturbation theory, constructing a low cost multispectral imaging laboratory at TAU for imaging ostraca, and using it to observe a biblical-period inscription unnoticed for half a century, climate engineering based on soil composition measurements at Yatir forest in Israel demonstrating how to mitigate global warming by sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide as inorganic carbon in the unsaturated zone under semi-arid forests.
Future directions: focus on continuing measurements of carbon sequestration and improving measurement methods.
