My research focuses on studying the quark-gluon liquid at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory using the STAR detector. At RHIC, we collide gold nuclei at center-of-mass energies of up to 200 GeV per nucleon pair. At this energy, the protons and neutrons in the incident nuclei are transformed into a hot, dense, and strongly interacting liquid of quarks and gluons. This quark-gluon liquid is a nearly perfect liquid, which has nearly zero viscosity as evidenced by the comparison of flow measurements to hydrodynamic calculations. The universe is thought to have existed in this form a few microseconds after the big bang.

The main detector of STAR is its time projection chamber (TPC). This TPC can produce a full three-dimensional picture of the collision of two ultrarelativistic nuclei. A collision of two gold nuclei is shown as measured in the STAR detector. Each line in the picture corresponds to a single particle leaving the collision. Several thousand tracks are observed in this one central collision. The color of the track represents the ionization density of the track. By correlating the curvature of the track and its ionization density, the particles that created the track can be identified.