KENT STATE PHYSICS PROFESSOR RECEIVES DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY GRANT TO STUDY THE CONDITIONS OF THE EARLY UNIVERSE
A physics professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University recently received a $307,000, two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support the development of a novel approach to studying non-equilibrium dynamics in the quark gluon plasma (QGP).
Using a local supercomputer that he built at Kent State, Michael Strickland, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, hopes to better understand the conditions of the early universe and the Big Bang.
The grant will allow Strickland to continue the development of anisotropic hydrodynamics (aHydro) and use it to make theoretical predictions for a host of observable measurements in particle collider experiments.
“This research is important because it allows us to have a much more reliable model of the dynamics of the matter generated in heavy ion collisions and hence, the early universe,” Strickland said.