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In this work Paul Sorensen has analyzed the production of mesons and baryons in heavy-ion collisions at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). In 2005, physicists at RHIC created the most perfect fluid in nature, called quark-gluon plasma, a hot, dense matter formed out of quarks and gluons that permeated the universe one microsecond after its birth. Sorensen's work plays a key role in elucidating that the flow of matter in the heavy-ion collisions is dominated by subatomic particles called quarks, indicating that quark-gluon plasma had been created. Sorensen's work helped discover quark number scaling in the elliptic flow of hadrons in nucleus-nucleus collisions, and he develops the interpretation showing the relevance of quark degrees of freedom in heavy ion interactions.
About the author
Paul Sorensen was raised in the small town of Corbett Oregon. He earned a B.S. in Physics at the U. of Nebraska and a PhD from UCLA. His thesis won the RHIC and AGS thesis award. He was a Goldhaber Distinguished Fellow at Brookhaven National Lab. He has also won the APS Valley Prize and the Presidential Early Career Award.
