Fuqiang Wang   Department of Physics, Purdue University, 525 Northwestern Avenue, West Lafayette, IN 47907 official home page   Tel: (765) 494-5510   Fax: (765) 494-0706   fqwang@purdue.edu

Courses taught: PHYS 152, 172 (Modern Mechanics - Chabay & Sherwood, Matter & Interactions), PHYS 410 (Thornton & Marion, Physical Mechanics I - Honors), PHYS 344 (Tipler & Llewellyn, Modern Physics - Honors) PHYS 342L (Modern Physics Lab), PHYS 272H - E&M Honors (Chabay & Sherwood, Matter & Interactions)

My research involves studies of high energy heavy-ion collisions. The objective of these studies is to search for quark-gluon plasma, a deconfined state of quarks and gluons (basic building blocks of matter). The phase transition from ordinary hadronic matter to quark-gluon plasma is predicted by Quantum Chromodynamics to occur at a temperature of about 170 MeV (10^{12 o}K). The early universe is believed to be in the quark-gluon plasma state during a brief period of time after the Big Bang. The quark-gluon plasma may exist in the core of neutron stars. Discovering and studying the quark-gluon plasma will further our understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics and our knowledge about Nature.

My research activities are associated with the Experimental High Energy Nuclear Physics Group in the Physics Department of Purdue University. The focus of our group is on the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. We have taken data with proton-proton, deuteron-gold, copper-copper, and gold-gold collisions at center-of-mass energies of 20, 62, 130, and 200 GeV per nucleon-nucleon pair. Our group assumes many responsibilities in the STAR experiment. I have wide span of physics interests with primary focus on high transverse momentum and jet physics.

Discovery of the "Perfect Liquid": BNL Press Release
Characterization of freeze-out properties of heavy-ion collisions: Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 (2004) 112301-1-6, Phys. Rev. C 79 (2009) 034909-1-58
Jet-medium interactions and conical emission of correlated particles: J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys 30 (2004) S1299-1303, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 (2005) 152301-1-6, Nucl. Phys. A783 (2007) 511-514, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102 (2009) 052302