Berndt Müller

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Muller in front of Paul Dirac's commemorative stone, Saint-Maurice, Switzerland. BerndtDiractPortrait32.jpg
Müller in front of Paul Dirac's commemorative stone, Saint-Maurice, Switzerland.

Berndt O. Mueller (also Berndt Müller) (born 8 February 1950 in Markneukirchen, German Democratic Republic) is a German-born theoretical physicist who specializes in nuclear physics. [1] [2] He is a professor at Duke University.

Contents

Life

Müller moved with his mother to Frankfurt am Main in 1953 , where they joined his father. He enrolled as a student at the Goethe University Frankfurt in 1968 and graduated in 1972. Müller received his doctorate, with Walter Greiner as his doctoral advisor, in 1973. [3] In 1974, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and then Research Associate at the University of Washington. From 1976 he was a professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He has been a professor at Duke University since 1990 (since 1996 as "JB Duke Professor of Physics"). From 1997 to 1999 he was chairman of the Faculty of Physics and from 1999 to 2004 Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences. He is a US citizen. He was, among other guest scientists at Caltech (1980), the University of Cape Town(1984), the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the University of Tokyo, the Yukawa Institute of the University of Kyoto and the University of Arizona (1987).

Müller is concerned with the theory of quark–gluon plasma and evidence of its formation in heavy-ion scattering experiments (via enrichment with strange quarks), but also with chaos in gauge field theories, the Casimir effect, and neural networks.

Honours and awards

Books

Articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider</span> Particle accelerator

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is the first and one of only two operating heavy-ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used by an international team of researchers, it is the only operating particle collider in the US. By using RHIC to collide ions traveling at relativistic speeds, physicists study the primordial form of matter that existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. By colliding spin-polarized protons, the spin structure of the proton is explored.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J/psi meson</span> Subatomic particle made of a charm quark and antiquark

The
J/ψ
(J/psi) meson is a subatomic particle, a flavor-neutral meson consisting of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. Mesons formed by a bound state of a charm quark and a charm anti-quark are generally known as "charmonium" or psions. The
J/ψ
is the most common form of charmonium, due to its spin of 1 and its low rest mass. The
J/ψ
has a rest mass of 3.0969 GeV/c2, just above that of the
η
c
, and a mean lifetime of 7.2×10−21 s. This lifetime was about a thousand times longer than expected.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-energy nuclear physics</span> Intersection of nuclear physics and high-energy physics

High-energy nuclear physics studies the behavior of nuclear matter in energy regimes typical of high-energy physics. The primary focus of this field is the study of heavy-ion collisions, as compared to lighter atoms in other particle accelerators. At sufficient collision energies, these types of collisions are theorized to produce the quark–gluon plasma. In peripheral nuclear collisions at high energies one expects to obtain information on the electromagnetic production of leptons and mesons that are not accessible in electron–positron colliders due to their much smaller luminosities.

Hadronization is the process of the formation of hadrons out of quarks and gluons. There are two main branches of hadronization: quark-gluon plasma (QGP) transformation and colour string decay into hadrons. The transformation of quark-gluon plasma into hadrons is studied in lattice QCD numerical simulations, which are explored in relativistic heavy-ion experiments. Quark-gluon plasma hadronization occurred shortly after the Big Bang when the quark–gluon plasma cooled down to the Hagedorn temperature when free quarks and gluons cannot exist. In string breaking new hadrons are forming out of quarks, antiquarks and sometimes gluons, spontaneously created from the vacuum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">STAR detector</span>

The STAR detector is one of the four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States.

Quark matter or QCD matter refers to any of a number of hypothetical phases of matter whose degrees of freedom include quarks and gluons, of which the prominent example is quark-gluon plasma. Several series of conferences in 2019, 2020, and 2021 were devoted to this topic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quark–gluon plasma</span> Phase of quantum chromodynamics (QCD)

Quark–gluon plasma is an interacting localized assembly of quarks and gluons at thermal and chemical (abundance) equilibrium. The word plasma signals that free color charges are allowed. In a 1987 summary, Léon van Hove pointed out the equivalence of the three terms: quark gluon plasma, quark matter and a new state of matter. Since the temperature is above the Hagedorn temperature—and thus above the scale of light u,d-quark mass—the pressure exhibits the relativistic Stefan-Boltzmann format governed by temperature to the fourth power and many practically massless quark and gluon constituents. It can be said that QGP emerges to be the new phase of strongly interacting matter which manifests its physical properties in terms of nearly free dynamics of practically massless gluons and quarks. Both quarks and gluons must be present in conditions near chemical (yield) equilibrium with their colour charge open for a new state of matter to be referred to as QGP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johann Rafelski</span> German-American theoretical physicist

Johann Rafelski is a German-American theoretical physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, guest scientist at CERN (Geneva), and has been LMU-Excellent Guest Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Munich, Germany.

In high-energy nuclear physics, strangeness production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a signature and diagnostic tool of quark–gluon plasma (QGP) formation and properties. Unlike up and down quarks, from which everyday matter is made, heavier quark flavors such as strange and charm typically approach chemical equilibrium in a dynamic evolution process. QGP is an interacting localized assembly of quarks and gluons at thermal (kinetic) and not necessarily chemical (abundance) equilibrium. The word plasma signals that color charged particles are able to move in the volume occupied by the plasma. The abundance of strange quarks is formed in pair-production processes in collisions between constituents of the plasma, creating the chemical abundance equilibrium. The dominant mechanism of production involves gluons only present when matter has become a quark–gluon plasma. When quark–gluon plasma disassembles into hadrons in a breakup process, the high availability of strange antiquarks helps to produce antimatter containing multiple strange quarks, which is otherwise rarely made. Similar considerations are at present made for the heavier charm flavor, which is made at the beginning of the collision process in the first interactions and is only abundant in the high-energy environments of CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Alfred H. Mueller is an American theoretical physicist, and the Enrico Fermi Professor of Physics at Columbia University.

Sergei Voloshin is a Russian-American experimental high-energy nuclear physicist and Professor of Physics at Wayne State University. He is best known for his work on event-by-event physics in heavy ion collisions.

Walter Greiner was a German theoretical physicist. His research interests lay in atomic physics, heavy ion physics, nuclear physics, elementary particle physics. He is known for his series of books in theoretical physics, particularly in Germany but also around the world.

Helen Louise Caines is a Professor of Physics at Yale University. She studies the quark–gluon plasma and is the co-spokesperson for the STAR experiment.

The Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics is a prize awarded annually by the American Physical Society to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in theoretical nuclear physics. The $10,000 prize is in honor of Herman Feshbach of MIT. The prize, inaugurated in 2014, is awarded to one person or is shared among two to three persons when all of the recipients are credited with the same accomplishment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emanuele Quercigh</span> Italian particle physicist (born 1934)

Emanuele Quercigh is an Italian particle physicist who works since 1964 at CERN, most known for the discovery of quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Quercigh moved as a child to Friuli with his mother and his younger brother after the early death of his father. Quercigh studied physics at the University of Milan in Italy, where he became assistant of professor Giuseppe Occhialini in 1959.

Helga Ernestine Rafelski, was a German particle physicist. She got her professional degree from Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, her master's degree from University of Illinois at Chicago in 1977 and her PhD from University of Cape Town in 1988 under the advisement of Raoul D. Viollier. She studied muon-catalysed fusion and relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Saskia Mioduszewski is a nuclear physicist and professor at Texas A&M University.

Julia Apostolova Velkovska is a Bulgarian-American high energy particle physicist who is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University. Her research considers nuclear matter in the extreme conditions generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. She hopes that this work will help to explain the mechanisms that underpin the strong force.

Hannah Elfner is a German physicist who is Head of Simulations at the Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research and Professor of Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She was named the 2021 Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation Scientist of the Year.

Larry D. McLerran is an American physicist and an academic. He is a professor of physics at the University of Washington.

References

  1. Duke University (2018). "Berndt Mueller: James B. Duke Professor of Physics". Duke University. Archived from the original on 30 October 2018.
  2. "Berndt Mueller: Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear & Particle Physics". Brookhaven National Laboratory. 2018. Archived from the original on 19 July 2017.
  3. Müller, Berndt (1973). Die Zweizentren-Dirac-Gleichung (Thesis). Frankfurt a. M., Univ., Diss.
  4. "List of Winners of the Roentgen Prize". Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. Archived from the original on 28 April 2020. Retrieved 28 April 2020.
  5. "APS Fellow Archive". www.aps.org. Archived from the original on 28 April 2020. Retrieved 28 April 2020.
  6. "CV—Berndt O. Mueller" (PDF). Retrieved 28 April 2020.
  7. "Physics - Berndt Müller". physics.aps.org. Archived from the original on 28 April 2020. Retrieved 28 April 2020.
  8. "Berndt Mueller Awarded 2021 Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics". Brookhaven National Laboratory. Retrieved 16 October 2020.