Sergei Voloshin

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Sergei Voloshin
Born (1953-02-18) February 18, 1953 (age 69)
Donetsk, Ukraine
NationalityRussian, American
Alma mater Moscow Engineering Physics Institute
Known for Relativistic heavy ion collisions
AwardsFellow of American Physical Society, elected to WSU Academy of Scholars
Scientific career
Fields Physics
Institutions University of Heidelberg
University of Pittsburgh
LBNL
Wayne State University

Sergei Voloshin (born February 18, 1953) 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.

Contents

Career

Sergei Voloshin studied physics at Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, where he completed his PhD in nuclear physics in 1980 and became a faculty member at the Department of Theoretical Physics. During the period from 1992 to 1999 he was a visiting scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, Physikalische Institute (University of Heidelberg) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) where he worked on anisotropic flow and event-by-event physics in nuclear collisions at SPS and RHIC. In 1999 Dr. Voloshin joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Wayne State University.

Work

One of the best known Voloshin's contribution is the analysis and interpretation of the so-called anisotropic flow in heavy ion collisions. [1] [2] He played a leading role in the discovery of the strong elliptic flow at RHIC. [3] Large elliptic flow, consistent with calculations from ideal hydrodynamics, was a key to the concept of strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma, a new form of matter discovered at RHIC. The idea of the constituent quark scaling, proposed by Voloshin, and its observation at RHIC is widely regarded as a proof for a deconfinement phase transition. His recent research interests include studies of possible local parity violation in strong interaction in heavy ion collisions.

Dr. Voloshin is a member of the STAR Collaboration performing experiments at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and the ALICE Collaboration at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

Honors

Related Research Articles

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High-energy nuclear physics Intersection of nuclear physics and high-energy physics

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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 strangeness 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.

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John Harris (physicist)

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Arthur M. Poskanzer was an experimental physicist, known for his pioneering work on relativistic nuclear collisions.

Christine Aidala American high-energy nuclear physicist

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.

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Olga Evdokimov is a Russian born professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). She is a High Energy Nuclear Physicist, who currently collaborates on two international experiments; the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

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.

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.

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References

  1. Methods for analyzing anisotropic flow in relativistic nuclear collisions", A. M. Poskanzer and S. A. Voloshin, Physical Review C 58, (1998) 1671–1678.
  2. "Flow study in relativistic nuclear collisions by Fourier expansion of Azimuthal particle distributions", S. Voloshin, Y. Zhang, Zeitschrift für Physik 70 (1996) 665-672.
  3. Elliptic Flow in Au+Au Collisions at √sNN = 130GeV," STAR Collaboration, Physical Review Letters 86, (2001) 402–407.
  4. "Wayne State physics professor honored by American Physical Society". Wayne State University. May 23, 2009. Retrieved January 16, 2019.
  5. "Professor Sergei Voloshin Elected Member of WSU Academy of Scholars". Wayne State University. April 20, 2012. Retrieved January 16, 2019.