Gökçe Başar, one of our assistant professors in Physics and Astronomy, has received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his research on strongly interacting matter in extreme environments. The CAREER Award is the Foundation’s most prestigious award given to junior faculty and provides five years of funding.
The award will support Prof. Başar research which focuses on exploring the phases of matter that occur at a trillion degrees–the temperature of the Universe microseconds after the Big Bang. In such environments, protons and neutrons melt, and their constituents (quarks and gluons) roam freely, forming a peculiar phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma–tiny droplets of which are recreated nowadays in heavy ion collision experiments. Prof Başar’s group will develop a new formulation of fluid dynamics that incorporates the novel properties of quark-gluon plasma and build a framework that can be used to computationally study its properties at different temperatures and densities.
More information on the award can be found at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2143149