WIT BUSZA, Francis Friedman
Professor of Physics
Research Interests
Shortly after the big bang, our universe consisted of a sort of
a homogeneous soup of point like particles. The hadronic part of
this soup was a dense collection of quarks and gluons. Matter was
in a phase called a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). This soup expanded
and cooled. At about a microsecond, when the universe was about
the size of the solar system, the universe went through a transition
(probably a phase transition). The quarks and gluons coalesced into
globules of hadronic matter. For the first time hadrons (e. g.
protons, neutrons, pions) were formed. Professor Busza and his group
are trying to recreate and study in the laboratory, on a small scale,
this transition.
In a big collider called RHIC at the Brookhaven National Laboratory,
nuclei as heavy as gold are accelerated to almost the speed of light
and made to collide head on with each other. In the process, unprecedented
energy and matter densities are created, large enough, Prof. Busza
believes, to create the QGP. Such collisions are made to occur in
four locations around the RHIC collider. The Busza group has surrounded
one of the interaction regions with a sophisticated instrument with
which they can look at the consequences of the collisions. They
hope to see evidence of the formation of a QGP and then study how
it decays back into ordinary hadronic matter. This will teach us
not only something about the history of the universe at a millionth
of a second after the big bang, but also about the properties of
hadronic matter and of the vacuum. This research project is called
Phobos. Professor Busza launched, and is currently the spokesperson
for, the project. Other MIT faculty involved are Profs. Gunther
Roland and Bolek Wyslouch.
It is part of the research effort of the MIT
Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS).
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Biographical Sketch
Professor Wit Busza received the B.Sc. (1960) and Ph.D. (1964)
from University College in London and joined MIT in 1969, becoming
a full Professor in 1979. In 1990, he was awarded the Buechner Prize
for Outstanding Contributions to the Education Program in the Department
of Physics, and in 1993 he was awarded the School of Science Prize
for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at MIT. In 1995, Professor
Busza was appointed a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He is a
member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of
the American Physical Society.
[top] Selected Publications
Back, BB et al., "The PHOBOS Perspective on Discoveries at
RHIC", submitted to Nucl. Phys. A (2004) nucl-ex/0410022.
Busza, W, "Structure and Fine Structure in Multiparticle Production
Data at High Energies", Acta Phys.Polon.B 35:
2873-2894 (2004) nucl-ex/0410035.
Busza, W, RL Jaffe, J Sandweiss, F Wilczek, "Review of Speculative
'Disaster Scenarios' at RHIC", Rev.Mod.Phys. 72:1125-1140
(2000) hep-ph/9910333.
Abe K, I Abt, CJ Ahn, et al., "Measurement of Alpha(S)(M(Z)(2))
From Hadronic Event Observables At The Z(0) Resonance", Phys
Rev D 51 (3): 962-984 (1995).
Busza, W, "Review of Data Related to our Understanding of
the Attenuation of Photons (Real and Virtual) and Hadrons as They
Pass Through Nuclear Matter", Nucl.Phys.A 544:
49-64 (1992).
Busza, W and R Ledoux, "Energy Deposition in High-Energy Proton-Nucleus
Collisions", Ann. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. 38: 119-159
(1988).
Busza, W and AS Goldhaber, "Nuclear Stopping Power",
Phys. Lett. 139B: 235 (1984).
Barton, DS, GW Brandenburg, W Busza, et al., "Experimental-Study
of the A-Dependence of Inclusive Hadron Fragmentation", Phys
Rev D 27 (11): 2580-2599 (1983).
Elias, JE et al., "An Experimental Study of Multiparticle
Production in Hadron-Nucleus Interactions at High-Energy",
Phys. Rev. D 22: 13 (1980).
Busza, W, "Review of Experimental Data on Hadron-Nucleus Collisions
at High-Energies", Acta Phys.Polon.B 8:333 (1977).
Busza, W, JE Elias, DF Jacobs, et al., "Charged-Particle Multiplicity
in Pi-Nucleus Interactions at 100 and 175 GeV-C", Phys.
Rev. Lett. 34 (13): 836-839 (1975).
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