Research

Carla Frohlich's research covers a range of topics including astrophysical nuclear reactions, the stellar evolution of massive stars, the composition of core collapse supernova ejecta, radioactive abundances of stellar debris in protosolar nebula, and nucleosynthesis processes such as rapid neutron capture (r-process) and antineutrino-proton absorption (neutrino-p-process). She is also interested in computational simulations of supernova explosions and the roles of nuclear structure, plasma dynamics, and neutrino cross sections and transport. Other research interests include galactic chemical evolution and abundances in metal-poor stars.

Chueng-Ryong Ji's research focuses on theoretical predictions for the structure and spectra of ordinary, strange, charm, and bottom mesons and baryons. This includes exotic molecular aspects as well as glueball components. To construct a realistic quark/gluon model of hadrons consistent with experimental data, relativity is explicitly realized by taking into account the symmetries of the lightcone, unitarity, duality, and the discrete symmetries C, P, and T. One primary interest is to investigate the nonperturbative vacuum of QCD using many body techniques and effective field theory. He is currently a member of the International Light Cone Advisory Committee (ILCAC) and has been a theory consultant for JLAB and Seoul National University. His research with several graduate students has attracted SURA fellowships in recent years.

James Kneller's research focuses upon neutrino astrophysics and nucleosynthesis at different epochs in the history of the universe from the Big Bang through to the present day. In recent years he has paid particular attention to the evolving flavor composition of neutrinos as they propagate through supernovae and how various mechanisms that drive that evolution manifest themselves in the signal we expect to observe when we next detect the burst from a galactic supernova. From this signal he hopes to tease out the unknown properties of the neutrino such as the ordering of the neutrino masses, the size of the last mixing angle and the CP phase. Other interests include Big Bang nucleosynthesis, cosmic ray spallation and cosmic and galactic chemical evolution.

Sebastian Koenig's research covers a range of topics in theoretical low-energy nuclear physics, centered around effective field theory applied to few-nucleon systems, finite-volume techniques relevant for lattice field theory simulations, and other aspects of ab initio calculations. This work focuses in particular on phenomena which are universal in the sense that they apply to very different systems—not limited to nuclear physics—at the same time. He is furthermore interested in efficient numerical applications and topics in computer science. Simulating quantum systems on computers at various scales is an important aspect of his work.

Gail McLaughlin's research is in theoretical nuclear and particle astrophysics. She studies the way in which nuclear reactions and subatomic particles affect astrophysical objects and vice-versa. She is particularily interested in supernovae, which are the end states of massive stars, and gamma ray bursts, which still have an unknown origin. For example, she studies how detecting neutrinos from supernovae could tell us both about the conditions in supernovae and also about fundamental properties of neutrinos. She is also interested in how and where elements are formed. For example, she models environments which could produce gamma ray bursts with the goal of explaining recent detections of iron in their spectra.

Thomas Schaefer's research interests include the QCD phase diagram, color superconductivity, the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, kaon condensation, large-N QCD, confinement, thermal field theory, high-density effective theory, instantons, heavy ion collisions, hadronic physics, cold atomic gases, viscous hydrodynamics, transport properties, and many body theory.

Vladimir Skokov is a theoretical physicist specializing in high energy nuclear physics. His primary research interests are Quantum Chromodynamics in extreme conditions, including hight temperature, density or/and magnetic field. Additionally, Dr. Skokov studies the nuclear structure and nuclear wave functions at high energies. Recent experiment and advances in theory suggest that, at high energies, every hadron, including proton, neutron and nucleus appear as dense “walls” of gluons, creating what might be among the strongest (chromo)electric and magnetic fields in nature. Studying this novel form of matter, the so-called color glass condensate, will help better understand non-linear dynamics of quantum-chromodynamics.

Mithat Ünsal's research interests include QCD, QCD-like and chiral theories, thermal field theory, confinement, topological field theories, gauge theory dynamics and applications of resurgence theory, resummation in perturbation theory and topological configurations, classification of topological excitations, supersymmetric gauge dynamics and supersymmetry breaking, supersymmetry on the lattice, lattice gauge theory, large-N volume independence, Eguchi-Kawai reduction, orbifold-orientifold equivalences, gauge/string dualities, string theory, and D-branes.