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Department News

Physics Colloquium on Friday, March 23

Mar 20, 2012

PHYSICS COLLOQUIUM

Speaker: Dr. Marzia Rosati
Date: March 23, 2012 (Friday)
Time: 4 PM
Room: 205 Currens Hall


Making little big bangs at RHIC

Abstract:
Relativistic heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory create an extremely hot system at temperatures (T) expected within only the first microseconds after the Big Bang. At these temperatures (T ~ 1012 K), which are several hundred thousand times hotter than the sun's core, normal hadrons cannot exist and nuclear matter "melts" to form a "soup" of quarks and gluons. Many observables point to a picture of the medium as rapidly equilibrating and expanding as a nearly perfect fluid perhaps the most perfect found in nature since the Big Bang.

About the speaker:
Dr. Marzia Rosati is a physics professor at Iowa State University and she works in the area of experimental nuclear physics with a focus on relativistic heavy ion collisions. Dr.Rosati is also interested in the study of quarkonium suppression in relativistic heavy ion collisions. She participated in the PHENIX experiment at RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In the past ten years, Dr. Rosati has studied AuAu, CuCu, pp, and dAu collisions. Results of this research have been reported in several papers and news articles on RHIC.