Saskia Mioduszewski | |
|---|---|
| Nationality |  |
| Alma mater | |
| Awards | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Experimental nuclear physics |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Centrality dependence of antiproton production in Proton-Nucleus Collisions at 17.5 and 12.3 GeV (1999) |
| Website | https://cyclotron.tamu.edu/mio/ |
Saskia Mioduszewski is a nuclear physicist and professor at Texas A&M University.
Mioduszewski completed an undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics in 1994 at North Carolina State University. In 2000, she obtained her PhD in physics from the University of Tennessee. [1] Her PhD thesis was called Centrality dependence of antiproton production in Proton-Nucleus Collisions at 17.5 and 12.3 GeV. [2]
Between 2000 and 2005, Mioduszewski was a postdoctoral research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory. During this time, she contributed to the PHENIX Experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). [1]
In 2005, she became an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. She continues to work with the RHIC on the STAR Collaboration and is a member of the Cyclotron Institute. [3] She is interested in studying ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. [1] In particular, she studies the transition between nuclear or "hadronic" matter and the state known as Quark Gluon Plasma. [3]
An application of Mioduszewski's work is in replicating conditions similar to just after the Big Bang by colliding gold particles accelerated to nearly the speed of light. The result of the high-speed collisions is a new particle called an "anti-hypertriton". The particles then cool and decay over lifetimes shorter than nanosecond timescales. These experiments are carried out at RHIC and may help improve understanding of nuclear interactions as well as the distribution of matter and antimatter in the universe. Today, matter appears to be far more prevalent than antimatter, and this asymmetry remains an active research area. [4] [5]
Mioduszewski is married to Ralf Rapp, another physics professor at Texas A&M University. They have a son. [12] [13]
Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the study of combination of protons and neutrons is called nuclear physics.
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.
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.
The STAR detector is one of the four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States.
William Allen Zajc is a U.S. physicist and the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics at Columbia University in New York, USA, where he has worked since 1987.
In high-energy physics, jet quenching is a phenomenon that can occur in the collision of ultra-high-energy particles. In general, the collision of high-energy particles can produce jets of elementary particles that emerge from these collisions. Collisions of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion particle beams create a hot and dense medium comparable to the conditions in the early universe, and then these jets interact strongly with the medium, leading to a marked reduction of their energy. This energy reduction is called "jet quenching".
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.
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.
John William Harris is an American experimental high energy nuclear physicist and D. Allan Bromley Professor of Physics at Yale University. His research interests are focused on understanding high energy density QCD and the quark–gluon plasma created in relativistic collisions of heavy ions. Dr. Harris collaborated on the original proposal to initiate a high energy heavy ion program at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland, has been actively involved in the CERN heavy ion program and was the founding spokesperson for the STAR collaboration at RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S.
Barbara Jacak is a nuclear physicist who uses heavy ion collisions for fundamental studies of hot, dense nuclear matter. She is director of the Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. Before going to Berkeley, she was a member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, where she held the rank of distinguished professor. She is a leading member of the collaboration that built and operates the PHENIX detector, one of the large detectors that operated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and was involved in the discovery of the quark gluon plasma and its strongly coupled, liquid-like behavior. Throughout her career she has served on many advisory committees and boards, including the National Research Council Committee on Nuclear Physics, and the Physical Review C editorial board.
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Christine Angela Aidala is an American high-energy nuclear physicist, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. She studies nucleon structure and parton dynamics in quantum chromodynamics.
Berndt O. Mueller is a German-born theoretical physicist who specializes in nuclear physics. He is a professor at Duke University.
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.
Claude Pruneau is a Canadian-American experimental high-energy nuclear physicist. He is a professor of physics at Wayne State University and the author of several books. He is best known for his work on particle correlation measurements in heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider.
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.
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