Prof. Wit Busza

Shortly after the big bang, our universe consisted of a sort of a homogeneous soup of point like particles. The hadronic part of this soup was a dense collection of quarks and gluons. Matter was in a phase called a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). This soup expanded and cooled. At about a microsecond, when the universe was about the size of the solar system, the universe went through a transition (probably a phase transition). The quarks and gluons coalesced into globules of hadronic matter. For the first time hadrons (e. g. protons, neutrons, pions) were formed. Professor Busza and his group are trying to recreate and study in the laboratory, on a small scale, this transition.

In a big collider called RHIC at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, nuclei as heavy as gold are accelerated to almost the speed of light and made to collide head on with each other. In the process, unprecedented energy and matter densities are created, large enough, Prof. Busza believes, to create the QGP. Such collisions are made to occur in four locations around the RHIC collider. The Busza group has surrounded one of the interaction regions with a sophisticated instrument with which they can look at the consequences of the collisions. They hope to see evidence of the formation of a QGP and then study how it decays back into ordinary hadronic matter. This will teach us not only something about the history of the universe at a millionth of a second after the big bang, but also about the properties of hadronic matter and of the vacuum. This research project is called Phobos. Professor Busza launched, and is currently the spokesperson for, the project. Other MIT faculty involved are Profs. Gunther Roland and Bolek Wyslouch. It is part of the research effort of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS).