125th Distinguished Research Lecture: Jamie Nagle
10 Trillion Degrees: Unlocking the Secrets of the Early Universe
Thursday, February 6 @ 4–5 p.m. (Q&A and reception to follow)
Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium, Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE)
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10,000,000,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit! That’s the unimaginable temperature of the universe just moments after the Big Bang—more than 10,000 times hotter than the Sun’s core. According to nuclear theory, at such extreme temperatures, ordinary matter made of protons and neutrons transforms into a plasma of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons. At the world’s most powerful accelerators, scientists recreate tiny droplets of this early-universe matter by colliding heavy nuclei at near-light speeds.
Over the past 20 years, Professor Jamie Nagle’s research group has not only studied these fleeting droplets but has also engineered their shapes, sizes and temperatures to better understand their properties. This work has inspired applications in other fields, pushing the boundaries of what we can learn about the fundamental forces of nature—and the origins of everything we see around us.
Professor Jamie Nagle (Physics) is interested in the nuclear physics interactions that dominated the earliest universe, just microseconds after the big bang. He studies this early-universe matter—made of subatomic particles, quarks and gluons—in the laboratory by creating tiny droplets of this substance at large accelerator facilities in the U.S and Europe.
Funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science through several grants including an Outstanding Junior Investigator award, his research has appeared in over 700 peer reviewed journals, including Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters and Genetics.
Nagle has served on the U.S. Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, the Brookhaven Program Advisory Committee and as Lead Referee on the Large Hadron Collider Committee. He has also been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, Nordea Bank Visiting Scholar, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and Co-Spokesperson for the PHENIX Experiment. He is currently Run Coordinator for the PHENIX Experiment. In his spare time, Jamie is a marathon runner and has completed all the world marathon majors.