Research Area:
Theoretical Nuclear and Particle Physics

My research currently focuses on (nuclear) matter at extreme energy density. Quantum chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of nuclear forces, predicts that nuclear matter dissolves into quarks and gluons, the constituents of nucleons, when a critical energy density is exceeded. My collaborators and I are studying the properties of this quark-gluon plasma from the theoretical point of view. We are developing the theory of the formation of a quark-gluon plasma, in particular the problem of thermalization, and we study methods of its detection in high-energy nuclear collisions.