Nuclear Matter at the Extremes: The Guts of the Proton and the Primordial Plasma
| Date/Time: | Tuesday, 26 Mar 2019 from 4:10 pm to 5:00 pm |
|---|---|
| Location: | Phys 0003 |
| Phone: | 515-924-5441 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
Abstract: The proton and the Bohr model of the atom were both discovered in tandem over a hundred years ago. Today, the inner structure of the atom is measured with such astronomical precision that it now is even used to define the fundamental unit of time. But despite a century of investigation, the internal structure of the proton remains a mystery at the frontier of nuclear physics. The churning guts of the proton can only be detected by using particle accelerators to shatter it into fragments or to melt it into a nuclear plasma, with temperatures not seen since the first microsecond after the Big Bang. The strong nuclear force, which is responsible both for the complex structure of the proton and for the difficulty in measuring it, leads to exotic states of matter that are even more extreme, including a plasma that flows like the most perfect fluid ever created and the most intense radiation fields allowed in nature. The many-body, strongly-correlated physics of the nuclear force is thus a powerful bridge from the smallest quantum scales ever probed to the hottest temperatures ever created in the laboratory. In this talk, I will present recent results on some of these most extreme states of nuclear matter, explore the common theoretical framework that links them, and put it in context of other extreme, many-body phenomena.
Bio: Dr. Matthew Sievert is a nuclear theorist whose work focuses on a range of applications including the structure of the proton, the intense gluon fields achieved in hadrons and nuclei at high energies, the quark-gluon plasma, and the structure and modification of high-energy jets of hadrons. Dr. Sievert graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a B.S. in 2006 and M.S. in 2007, with an emphasis on theoretical soft condensed matter/biophysics. In graduate school, he applied this background in many-body dynamics to nuclear physics, graduating with a Ph.D. in 2014 under the advisement of Yuri Kovchegov. From 2014-2016 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and from 2016-2018 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers University.