Quark-gluon Plasma
The Â鶹ÊÓƵ Department of Physics is proud to welcome our newest faculty member, Dr. Zhangbu Xu.
Dr. Michael Strickland's group will participate in a new Topical Theory Collaboration funded by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics to explore the behavior of heavy flavor particles. The collaboration will receive $2.5 Million from the DOE Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, over five years. That funding will provide partial support for six graduate students and three postdoctoral fellows at 10 institutions, as well as a senior staff position at one of the national laboratories. It will also establish a bridge junior faculty position at Â鶹ÊÓƵ.
Up until approximately 10^(-5) seconds after the Big Bang, the Universe was is a primordial state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). This is due to the fact that the early Universe was extremely hot and in such a hot environment normal matter, e.g., atoms, atomic nuclei, and even neutrons and protons, did not exist.