Alumni

Fluids can be characterized by macroscopic properties such as viscosities or an equation of state. While the macroscopic properties of everyday fluids are determined by the electromagnetic interaction, an ensemble of fluids encountered in astrophysics and nuclear physics is dominated by the strong nuclear interaction. Relativistic collisions of heavy nuclei, performed at the Large Hadron Collider and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, concentrate sufficient energy at the point of impact to produce a strongly-coupled plasma of deconfined nuclear matter.

An exciting scientific frontier is the 3-dimensional exploration of nucleon (and nuclear) structure: nuclear femtography. The study of Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) captures the images of the transverse position distributions of fast moving quarks. Therefore, they provide richer information about the nucleon structure than the well known form factors and parton distribution functions. GPDs are accessible via exclusive reactions, where all particles in the final state are identified.

Direct searches for dark matter which targeted SUSY-motivated areas of parameter space employed well-studied nucleon interactions at keV to MeV energy scales to predict typical DM-nucleon interaction distributions. Much lighter DM, probed by a new generation of experiments sensitive to eV-scale energy deposits, however, rely instead on condensed matter effects to extract larger recoil energies from the DM than would be suggested by the simple elastic kinematics of heavier DM.