 STAR’s
Tim Hallman Hunts for Quark-Gluon Plasma
If
physicists had a choice, they’d probably all live at or near the
beginning of the universe. String theorists and their ilk
would live closest to the moment of creation, but those nuclear
physicists studying such concepts as the long-sought quark-gluon plasma
would not be far behind. The QGP, as it’s known, is thought to be the
soupy state of the universe after the quarks and gluons began to
condense from the energy of the Big Bang but before they were bound
inexorably into the neutrons and protons that make up the universe as we
know it today. And because the QGP is theoretically accessible in
earthly accelerators—particularly the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider,
or RHIC, at Brookhaven National Laboratory—this has made it one of the
hottest topics in physics.
RHIC collides gold nuclei together at energies that simulate the
temperature just after the Big Bang, and it’s in these collisions that
physicists expect to see the ephemeral signs of the QGP. This has made
one collaboration in particular, STAR (Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC), led
by Brookhaven’s Tim Hallman, one of the most highly cited research
groups in the field. In late 2005, STAR placed five reports in the Hot
Papers...
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 U.K.
Research Revisited: Not ALL Oxbridge
With nearly a decade having passed since this publication last surveyed university
research in the United Kingdom (Science Watch, 8[1]: 1-2,
January/February 1997), the focus again moves across the pond. Updating the
previous study, Science Watch evaluates performance in 21 main fields of
science and the social sciences over the last five years, ranking U.K.
universities according to two separate measures: impact (or citations per
paper), and total citations...
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