Prof. Brett Fadem – Colby College
“Putting the Squeeze on Nuclear Matter”
My talk will concentrate on the nature of nuclear matter under extreme conditions, such as those that might have existed microseconds after the Big Bang. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) allows us to recreate such conditions in very small regions of space and answer questions that have troubled scientists for decades. One of the most famous predictions in this field is that given high enough density or temperature, nucleons such as protons and neutrons will undergo a phase transition to a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). In a QGP, protons and neutrons would cease to exist. They would, instead, give way to a kind of soup of quarks and gluons. Some earlier efforts to create novel forms of nuclear matter were undertaken at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) which now injects heavy ions into RHIC. I have measured the yield of antiprotons at the AGS, and will explain how the measurement helps us to determine density. I will also describe new efforts that my students and I have made to help scientists measure the energy density from collisions at RHIC. In order to understand the many different sorts of measurements that have been made at the AGS and RHIC, quantities such as energy density must be determined.