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KRISHNA RAJAGOPAL, Professor of Physics
Research Interests
Professor Rajagopal enjoys thinking about QCD in extreme conditions
because it requires linking usually disparate strands of theoretical
physics, including particle and nuclear physics, cosmology, astrophysics
and condensed matter physics. His recent research interests include
the properties of the cold dense quark matter that may lie at the
centers of neutron stars, where the densities are so high that the
neutrons are crushed one upon another. Professor Rajagopal's work
shows that a lump of cold dense quark matter is the QCD analogue
of a superconductor but that if you were to look at it using ordinary
light, it would look like a transparent insulator and not like an
electric conductor as previously assumed. His work also shows that
somewhat less dense quark matter may be, in a certain sense, crystalline.
Professor Rajagopal has also done research on very hot quark matter,
of the sort that filled the universe shortly after the big bang
and that is created in current experiments at the Relativistic Heavy
Ion Collider. He has analyzed the critical point in the QCD phase
diagram and has proposed signatures for its experimental detection.
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Biographical Sketch
After growing up in Toronto, Professor Rajagopal did his undergraduate
work at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. He obtained his
doctorate at Princeton University in 1993 and then spent three years
at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. He then spent one year at Caltech
before coming to MIT in 1997.
Selected Publications
Professor Rajagopal's publications can be found on SPIRES.
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