Sergei Voloshin | |
---|---|
Born | Donetsk, Ukraine | February 18, 1953
Nationality | Russian, American |
Alma mater | Moscow Engineering Physics Institute |
Known for | Relativistic heavy ion collisions |
Awards | Fellow 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.
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.
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.
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 (QGP) 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 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.
Relativistic heavy-ion collisions produce very large numbers of subatomic particles in all directions. In such collisions, flow refers to how energy, momentum, and number of these particles varies with direction, and elliptic flow is a measure of how the flow is not uniform in all directions when viewed along the beam-line. Elliptic flow is strong evidence for the existence of quark–gluon plasma, and has been described as one of the most important observations measured at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
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.
The PHENIX detector is the largest of the four experiments that have taken data at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States.
Dr. Yadav Pandit is a research scholar from Nepal, working in the field of Experimental Nuclear Physics.
Chiral magnetic effect (CME) is the generation of electric current along an external magnetic field induced by chirality imbalance. Fermions are said to be chiral if they keep a definite projection of spin quantum number on momentum. The CME is a macroscopic quantum phenomenon present in systems with charged chiral fermions, such as the quark-gluon plasma, or Dirac and Weyl semimetals. The CME is a consequence of chiral anomaly in quantum field theory; unlike conventional superconductivity or superfluidity, it does not require a spontaneous symmetry breaking. The chiral magnetic current is non-dissipative, because it is topologically protected: the imbalance between the densities of left-handed and right-handed chiral fermions is linked to the topology of fields in gauge theory by the Atiyah-Singer index theorem.
Arthur M. Poskanzer was an experimental physicist, known for his pioneering work on relativistic nuclear collisions.
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.
Helen Louise Caines is an Professor of Physics at Yale University. She studies the Quark–Gluon Plasma and is the co-spokesperson for the STAR experiment.
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.
Reinhard Stock is a German experimental physicist, specializing in heavy ion physics.