Relativistic heavy ion physics is of international and interdisciplinary interest to nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, condensed matter physics and cosmology. The primary goal of this field of research is to recreate in the laboratory a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which is predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics (Quantum Chromodynamics) to have existed ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang (origin of the Universe) and may exist in the cores of very dense stars.
The research activities of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Group at Yale are centered at Yale, but involve experimental research on the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York, and on the ALICE experiment with heavy ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at the Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Both experiments seek to form and investigate hot, dense QCD matter (the QGP) at several trillion degrees absolute temperature (Kelvin). (SEE RHIG RESEARCH for more information.)