News
May 2025: CW Robertson awarded the George W. Tautfest Award-
Congratulations to CW Robertson for winning the George W. Tautfest Award. The award was established in 1969 in honor of Prof. Tautfest who was the leader of the Purdue High Energy Physics group. The award honors outstanding physics graduate students in high energy particle physics, high energy nuclear physics, and astrophysics.
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Congratulations to Dr. CW Robertson who has successfully defended his Ph.D. The title of his thesis was "Measuring Global Spin Alignment of Vector Mesons at STAR." His thesis work developed a new method analyzing vector mason spin alignment by studying the "average" decay angle as a function of pair invariant mass, as well as an innovative data-driven correction method for detector acceptance and efficiency. His thesis work focused on the analysis of the φ-meson spin alignment and led to a discovery of an error in a prior publication.
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The Quark Matter Conference is the largest and most important conference in the field of relativistic heavy ion physics. It is held once every one and a half year, and this year it is held in Frankfurt, Germany during April 6-12, 2025. The Purdue High Energy Nuclear Physics group presented a strong show with three parallel talks given by postdoc Nihar Saha and students Soumik Chandra and Han-Sheng Li.
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The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at CERN, which includes significant contributions from Purdue University physicists, has been awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for its groundbreaking work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. Purdue University, a founding member of the CMS Collaboration, has played a vital role in this achievement. Seven faculty members from Purdue's Department of Physics and Astronomy are currently active in CMS research: Norbert Neumeister, Andreas Jung, Matthew Jones, Mia Liu, Fuqiang Wang, Wei Xie, and Neeti Parashar.
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Nihar Saha graduated from India Institute of Technology at Madras, India. His thesis title was "Measurement of azimuthal anisotropy of heavy flavor hadrons in Pb-Pb collisions wit the CMS experiemnt."
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Graduate student Joseph Bertaux has been recognized as one of the sPHENIX Heroes of the Month. He has made significant contributions to various aspects of the sPHENIX experiment at RHIC. Joseph has been instrumental in supporting the proton-proton data collection efforts, both during shifts and as a detector expert. For more information about Joseph and his work, please visit sPHENIX Hero: Joseph Bertaux.
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Congratulations to Soumik Chandra for winning the George W. Tautfest Award. The award was established in 1969 in honor of Prof. Tautfest who was the leader of the Purdue High Energy Physics group. The award honors outstanding physics graduate students in high energy particle physics, high energy nuclear physics, and astrophysics.
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Congratulations to Abby Wesolek for being awarded the Rolf Scharenberg Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship was named after Nuclear Physics Professor Emeritus Rolf P. Scharenberg. The fellowships allow first- or second-year graduate students to work with a research advisor for a summer prior to joining a research group permanently.
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Physical Review Journals has chronicled the rich 50-year history of QCD discovery. Part of the mentioned QCD history involved a STAR Collaboration publication by Purdue alumni Levente Molnar, then-postdoc Olga Barannikova, and Prof. Fuqiang Wang, of Purdue Physics and Astronomy. The paper, "Systematic measurements of identified particle spectra in pp, d+Au, and Au+Au collisions at the STAR detector," has been cited 1,042 times. It was Molnar's thesis work and is a culmination of a series of publications led by the High Energy Nuclear Physics group at Purdue.
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The Quark Matter Conference is the largest and most important conference in the field of relativistic heavy ion physics. It is held once every one and a half year, and this year it is held in Houston, Texas during September 3-9, 2023. The Purdue High Energy Nuclear Physics group presented a strong show with four parallel talks given by postdocs Yicheng Feng and Milan Stojanovic, and graduate students Soumik Chandra and An Gu. In addition, gradualte students Han-sheng Li and C.W. Robertson made poster presentations on their research. Link to conference site
Links to talks given by Yicheng Feng, Milan Stojanovic, Soumik Chandra, and An GuGraduate student An Gu is giving his talk on f0(980) quark content by CMS Graduate student Soumik Chandra is giving his talk on charm quark measurements by CMS Graduate student C.W. Robertson is in front of his poster reporting a new method to measure vector meson spin alignment in STAR Graduate student Han-sheng Li (left) is in front of his poster reporting on a new measurement of the chiral magnetic effect by STAR Purdue posters! Postdoc Milan Stojanovic is giving his talk on D0 measurements by CMS Postdoc Yicheng Feng is giving his talk on the chiral magnetic effect in isobar collisions by STAR
Hansheng discussing with Milan, Hansheng, Soumik and Milan at poster session
Milan giving his talk, Milan again, Yicheng giving his talk, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
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The STAR Experiment celebrates its 1,000th citation for a publication involving the vast information on particle production in high-energy heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The data reveal that a Little Bang is produced in those collisions that is hot (1012 degree, a billion time hotter than the surface of the sun), explosive (expanding faster than half the speed of light), and produces nearly equal amount of matter and antimatter, pretty much like the Big Bang of our universe. Citation: "Systematic measurements of identified particle spectra in pp, d+Au and Au+Au collisions at the STAR detector", STAR Collaboration, B.I. Abelev et al., Phys.Rev.C 79 (2009) 034909 (https://inspirehep.net/literature/793126) Purdue University is the leading institution of the paper. The principal authors from Purdue are Dr. Fuqiang Wang, Dr. Levente Molnar (Ph.D 2006), and former postdoc, Dr. Olga Evdokimov (now full professor at University of Illinois Chicago).
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Department of Physics and Astronomy Student Spotlight: Yicheng Feng "Enjoyment of basic physics grows into frontier research" is featured as a University Research News headline on the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science homepage https://www.energy.gov/science/office-science, and on tweet (@doescience).
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The chiral magnetic effect (CME) is a QCD phenomenon pertinent to CP violation in the strong interaction and possibly matter-antimatter asymmetry of our universe. CME search has been difficult because of the overwhelming background in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The innovative method utilizing spectator and participant planes is the latest in the quest for the CME. The STAR results from this method indicate a hint of possible CME signal in Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV at RHIC. Further investigation into possible non-CME physics causes is ongoing. The Purdue HENP group is the principal analyzer of the results. Link to journal publication
Link to Physics Department news
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BNL held a press release seminar on August 31, 2021 announcing results from a blind analysis of the isobar collision data by the STAR experiment. The isobar collisions were acquired to answer the pressing question of the chiral magnetic effect, predicted to exist by the fundamental theory of quantum chromodynamics that could explain the large matter-antimatter asymmetry of our universe. Purdue's HENP group is one of five analysis groups participating in the blind analysis. This is a three-year long effort, and is eagerly anticipated by the community and the U.S. Department of Energy who supported BNL research. The results did not turn out as initially expected, but have improved our knowledge on the strength of the chiral magnetic effect, and may point to where might be a good place to look for it, such as in the larger and more violent gold-gold collisions. Link to BNL's press release
Link to Physics Department news
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Congratulations to Yicheng Feng for winning the George W. Tautfest Award. The award was established in 1969 in honor of Prof. Tautfest who was the leader of the Purdue High Energy Physics group. The award honors outstanding physics graduate students in high energy particle physics, high energy nuclear physics, and astrophysics.
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Congratulations to Yicheng Feng for being awarded the Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship. The fellowships support recipients in the last year of their Ph.D. program to devote full-time effort to the completion of all requirements necessary to receive their doctoral degree.
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Congratulations to Rui Xiao for winning the George W. Tautfest Award. The award was established in 1969 in honor of Prof. Tautfest who was the leader of the Purdue High Energy Physics group. The award honors outstanding physics graduate students in high energy particle physics, high energy nuclear physics, and astrophysics.
- Congratulations to Rui Xiao for being awarded the Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship. The fellowships support recipients in the last year of their Ph.D. program to devote full-time effort to the completion of all requirements necessary to receive their doctoral degree.
- The CMS Λc+ results have been published: Production of Λc+ Baryons in Proton-Proton and Lead-Lead Collisions at 5.02 TeV, CMS Collaboration (Albert M Sirunyan et al.), Phys. Lett. B803 (2020) 135328, DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135328. This was the analysis work of mainly Rui Xiao, a graduate student with the group. The analysis constitutes the main part of her Ph.D. thesis work.
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Milan Stojanovic graduated from University of Belgrade, Serbia. His thesis work was on the measurements of azimuthal anisotropies of charged particles in pp, pPb, XeXe, and PbPb collisions with the CMS experiment. Those measurements have been published in Phys. Rev. Lett., 120 (2018) 092301 and Phys. Rev. C, 100 (2019) 044902.
- Congratulations to Dr. Cheng-chieh Peng who has successfully defended his Ph.D. The title of his thesis was "Measurement of Prompt Ds Meson Nuclear Modification Factor in pp and PbPb Collision with CMS Detector." His thesis work focused on data analysis on heavy flavor physics in CMS.
- The STAR small-system CME results have been published: Charge-Dependent Pair Correlations Relative to a Third Particle in p+Au and d+Au Collisions at RHIC, J. Adam et al. (STAR Collaboration), Phys. Lett. B798 (2019) 134975, DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2019.134975. This was the analysis work of mainly Jie Zhao, a postdoc with the group.
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The Quark Matter 2019 Conference was held in Wuhan, China during Nov. 4-9, 2019. Jie Zhao presented results on the chiral magnetic effect (CME) on behalf of the STAR Collaboration.
- Our CMS results on Λc+ production in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions at the LHC are featured in CERN Courier: New constraints on charm quark hadronisation, A.M. Sirunyan et al. (CMS Collaboration), CERN Courier 59, 4 (2019) 16. This was mainly the analysis work of Rui Xiao with Prof. Xie.
- Prof. Wang and Dr. Jie Zhao were invited by Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics to review the experimental status of the chiral magnetic effect: Experimental Searches for the Chiral Magnetic Effect in Heavy-Ion Collisions, Jie Zhao, Fuqiang Wang, Prog. Part. Nucl. Phys. 107 (2019) 200-236, DOI: 10.1016/j.ppnp.2019.05.001.
- The CMS beauty suppression results have been published: Studies of Beauty Suppression via Nonprompt D0 Mesons in Pb-Pb Collisions at √sNN=5.02 TeV, CMS Collaboration (Albert M Sirunyan et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 123 (2019) 022001, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.022001. This was the analysis work of mainly Hao Qiu, a postdoc with the group.
- Congratulations to Dr. Jie Zhao for winning the Brookhaven National Laboratory Merit Award for his pioneering work in the seach for chiral magnetic effect and the significant impact on the field.
- Congratulations to Dr. Liang Zhang who has successfully defended his Ph.D. The title of his thesis was "Event-plane Dependent Away-side Jet-like Correlation Shape in Relativistic Heavy-ion Collisions." His thesis work focused on data analysis on jet-like correlations in STAR. Liang was a visting graduate student from Central China Normal University (CCNU) with Prof. Feng Liu. Liang is now a high school science teacher in China.
- Congratulations to Dr. Liang He who has successfully defended his Ph.D. The title of his thesis was "Measurement of D0 directed flow and elliptic flow in Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV." His thesis work focused on data analysis on heavy flavor physics in STAR. Liang is now a Software Engineer with Data Brick in the San Francisco area.
- Congratulations to Dr. Jie Zhao for winning the prestigious Lee Grodzins Postdoctoral Award from MIT for his work on the Chiral Magnetic Effect in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions. The award was presented in honor of Lee Grodzins, a alumnus of this very Physics Department of Purdue University. The award was created to recognize the importance of original and unique work by postdoctoral fellows within the experimental nuclear and particle community.
- The Quark Matter 2018 Conference was held in Venezia, Italy during May 13-19, 2019. Jie Zhao presented results on the chiral magnetic effect (CME) on behalf of the STAR Collaboration.
- Congratulations to An Gu for being awarded a Graduate School Summer Research Grant. The grants provide support to doctoral students for summer research.
- Congratulations to Yicheng Feng for being awarded the Rolf Scharenberg Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship was named after Nuclear Physics Professor Emeritus Rolf P. Scharenberg. The fellowships allow first- or second-year graduate students to work with a research advisor for a summer prior to joining a research group permanently.
- Congratulations to Liang He for being awarded the Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship. The fellowships support recipients in the last year of their Ph.D. program to devote full-time effort to the completion of all requirements necessary to receive their doctoral degree.