About Me
I am a second year graduate student at the University of California, Davis working as part of the nuclear group with Daniel Cebra. I am also a TA for the physics 7 Series courses and am finishing up my own coursework.
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Ultimately the discipline of physics can be distilled down to three fundatmental components. Physics is the study of: 1. How things interact (Potential Energy), 2. How things move (Kinetic Energy), and 3. What those "Things" actually are. Any physics experiment aims to study one of the above by controlling the other two. In high energy heavy ion collisions we seek, among other things, to understand how nuclear matter intereacts at a variety of temperatures. In the vocabulary developed above - we give some known "thing" (a gold nucleus say) some known amount of kinetic energy by accelerating it around a particle collider. Colliding the nuclei together and studying what comes out in particle detectors allows us to elucidate the properties of the matter.
In a word, we are looking to map out the phase diagram of nuclear matter. Instead of asking:"Under what conditions is water a solid, liquid, or gas," we ask "Under what conditions does nuclear matter act like the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) that existed in the fractions of a second after the Big Bang?" For more detailed information on my research visit my research page and for more information on the research of the UCD Nuclear Group visity the group's webpage.