Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Primordial Soup

About the talk

On Nov. 21 we will have the privilege and pleasure of an evening with Jamie Dunlop… We will delve into a previously inaccessible landscape of quarks and gluons, which are the ‘particles’ that form protons and neutrons, two of the basic building elements of all matter. Why is this so fascinating? We have a profound existential need to learn about how we got here.

The machines and engineering effort required to study nucleons and quarks are incredible. The RHIC created a liquid of quarks and gluons at a temperature of 250 million degrees C, emulating the state of the universe trillionths of a second after the big bang. Jamie will tell us how and why this was done. The experiments underway and planned by the RHIC and its successor, the Electron-Ion Collider, may determine whether our current model of quantum physics, the Standard Model, is complete… It gives the correct answer to 14 decimal places, the most accurate predictions in science. But the Standard Model is not perfect — it cannot explain gravity, dark matter, or where all the antimatter in the early universe went.

About the speaker

In Jamie's own words: “I started working on experimental nuclear physics in the early 1990's as an undergraduate at Yale, pulling cables and testing equipment at Brookhaven National Laboratory… In 1999 I went back to Yale as a postdoc on one of the experiments at RHIC right in time for its first collisions, which showed dramatically that not only did we create the Quark Gluon Plasma but that it behaved as the most perfect liquid we can create in the laboratory. I moved to BNL as a staff scientist in 2004, served as Deputy Spokesperson for the STAR collaboration from 2009–2013, and have served since then as the Associate Chair for Nuclear Physics of the BNL Physics department, managing the operation of the experiments at RHIC.”

I will discuss the science that has come from the study of the hottest form of matter we can create in a lab, but also the sociology behind how big science gets done. The collaborations that build, operate and analyze the data from the experiments involve many hundreds of scientists, engineers, and technicians from institutions around the world… RHIC completes its mission, to be replaced by the Electron-Ion Collider, a powerful microscope (actually, femtoscope) to view the structure of the gluons that bind all normal matter together.