During his visit to Cape Town, Professor Venugopalan has spoken to graduate students on "The hottest stuff on earth: how it's formed, what it's made of, and how it flows" and "Exploring collective many-body dynamics of the perfect theory: theory meets experiment". He addressed a gathering of world-renowned international researchers from nine different countries at a recent week-long workshop at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, and led an open colloquium at UCT.
UCT lecturer Dr Will Horowitz said Professor Venugopalan led delegates at the workshop in discussions on the next generation of particle accelerators and new areas of physics still to be explored. Dr Horowitz added that UCT researchers were collaborating with colleagues at Brookhaven to develop new breakthroughs in theoretical physics. "Researchers at UCT and around the world are working to develop theories based on the exciting new results from Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland," said Dr Horowitz.
One area of interest to Dr Horowitz and his team is the collision of heavier elements such as lead. Dr Horowitz explained: "The Large Hadron Collider tends to be used to collide protons with other protons. When you collide lead on lead, you are smashing together 208 protons and neutrons in a single nucleus with another 208 protons and neutrons in another nucleus. This allows us to investigate the fundamental, emergent properties of hot and dense matter at extremely high energies."
Dr Horowitz said that the work of the Large Hadron Collider had led to important discussions of "the God particle", but that this idea was just one of many interesting open questions in theoretical physics. "The next generation of particle collider will provide us with a femtoscope to understand the detailed structure of the nucleus, which makes up 99% of the mass in the visible world," Dr Horowitz said.
