Dr. Martha Constantinou

Dr. Martha Constantinou, has recently being elected as Assistant Professor (tenure track) at the internationally renowned University of Temple in Philadelphia, US. Dr. Constantinou’s research focuses in the field of theoretical Nuclear Physics, particularly in studies of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental theory and of the strong nuclear force. This interaction links quarks and gluons together to form protons and neutrons, which are the basic structural elements of matter that makes up the visible world.

Dr. Constantinou received her bachelor (2003) and doctoral (2008) degree from the Department of Physics of the University of Cyprus. She worked as Postdoctoral Fellow at The Cyprus Institute until 2015 while in 2012 was a visiting lecturer at the University of Cyprus. Her doctoral thesis was held in Quantum Field Theory under the supervision of Professor Haralambos Panagopoulos, while the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation (RPF) funded her research. During her doctoral studies and to date, she has developed partnerships with researchers from international universities and research centers in Cyprus, Germany, Italy, France, England and Australia. In 2008 Dr. Constantinou joined the group of Professor Constantia Alexandrou and she is a member of the European Twisted Mass Collaboration, one of the largest research groups, which perform large-scale simulations of QCD. These calculations are performed on the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, including the Juelich SuperComputing Centre in Germany and the National SuperComputing Centre of Switzerland. Dr. Constantinou participated in many research projects funded by the RPF and the European Union, one of which ranked first among ninety other proposals under the supervision of Professor Ch. Panagopoulos (2013-2015).

Since June 2015, Dr. Constantinou is employed in the Computation Based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) of The Cyprus Institute, and she is involved in studies of the properties of protons and neutrons in the quantum chromodynamics lattice. A major issue being studied by the group and particularly by Dr. Constantinou is the structure of the proton, its size, and the contribution of quarks and gluons to its spin and momentum. One of the notable contributions of the group is the calculation of the so-called sigma terms for the proton and the determination of the active cross section scattering of possible particles for dark matter (supersymmetric neutralinos).

The size of the dark matter scattering amplitude from the ordinary nuclear matter depends on knowledge of sigma terms, and therefore, the calculations carried out at The Cyprus Institute and the University of Cyprus are of vital importance for any direct search of dark matter.