We're North & Central America's Quantum City here in Urbana-Champaign, IL! worldquantumday.org/quantum-city...

I had an idea to connect properties of (hyper)nuclei to chemical potentials. Considering that a nucleus is quantum many-body object with many crazy happenings going on, it's pretty shocking that it works this well. Biggest surprise was a large strangeness chemial potential! arxiv.org/pdf/2602.05824

Just caught the insane Illini upset over Maryland! This team is on fire! Go Illini! 📣🏀

Congratulations to the Illinois Women's Basketball team on making history today! They just won against Purdue, putting them at a 12-1 record for the season, 2-0 in the Big Ten, which is their best starting record ever! 🤩 🏀 Can't wait for their next home game! 🥂

What happens to fluids moving at the speed of light when they're far-from-equilibrium? Imagine you had something like ink and you wanted to see how it spread across such a relativistic fluid, we now can study that in our code CCAKE! arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22852

You're missing out if you're not catching the Illini Women's Basketball games! They just won 100-28 this afternoon. 😱

Recent write-up from me on the STAR collaboration's exciting new results for the search for the QCD critical point! physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

New method to find sub-threshold binary neutron star mergers from gravitational waves AND they found one!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

Virtually attending the talk of Mateus Reinke Pelicer, who is presenting the MUSES cyberinfrastructure at the INT today.

I just ran a recent paper that I'm writing through chatGPT to see if I was missing any obvious references. Dear lord, I hope nobody is relying on it for references! 😱 It suggested that would have been "right enough" for or a non-expert, but would have been very misleading.

New group photo, feels like we're starring in drama series!

There's a few quotes from me at the very end :) www.bnl.gov/newsroom/new...

Oxygen and neon collisions at the LHC for the first time ever 🚀 On 1 July, the four large #LHC experiments recorded particle collisions between oxygen and proton beams for the first time ever. Last week, they went a step further with oxygen-oxygen and neon-neon collisions.

Yay!! 🥳 Also, nice to see Illinois Physicist Riccardo Longo getting interviewed! atlas.cern/Updates/News...

2025 Saturated Glue (SURGE) Collaboration Meeting at UCLA — thank you all for making it so productive! Great to reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. Exciting progress, new energy, and a bright future ahead. Let’s keep moving forward together 💪💪🙏🙏

Caught the Botafogo-Atletico Madrid game over the lunch break at our SURGE collaboration meeting in LA. Both the meeting and the game were awesome!

Vai pra cima deles mengo! 🥳 🥅+⚽ 🥅+⚽ 🥅+⚽

I’m cheering so hard for Botafogo right now! 📣

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? Dead stars that can be up to a million times hotter than the sun are effective "zero temperatures" for everything that I care about. 😱

Rereading Rolf Hagedorn's famous paper on Hagedorn states/statistical bootstrap model and am very amused by this intro

Not good news for gravitational-wave or multimessenger astronomy "In FY 2026 NSF will operate only one of the two [LIGO] sites and will support a reduced level for technology development" ☄️⚛️🧪🔭

New paper out! How does the initial state in heavy-ion collisions at large densities translate into flow observables? We develop a new way to quantify the geometrical shape of these initial states and show this strongly correlates to the final state flow observables! arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16038

I got to pretend to be an experimentalists a bit and see sPHENIX! They even let me in the hard hat area.:D It's so cool to see where the magic happens

What happens to science under autocracy? The rise of the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany provides an (admittedly extreme) example. Prior to the early 1930s, scientists at German institutions won a third of Nobels. 10 years later, that number was 5%, and has never recovered.

The physics that connects the Big Bang, dead stars (neutron stars), and nuclear experiments comes from the strongest force in nature. Previous tools to study these regimes were mostly proprietary. Through the NSF CSSI we established the MUSES collaboration to create open-source codes. #WithoutNSF

"Scientists are being encouraged to share the stories of what NSF funding makes possible, and what is at stake, with the hashtag #WithoutNSF. Share your stories on social media and tag AAG so we can follow and amplify." #AAG

How do you connect neutron stars and lab experiments of heavy-ion collisions? Both are on the same phase diagram of the strong force, but with different charge fractions so one uses the symmetry energy expansion to connect these 2 regions. But there are issues.. arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18764

Why is this so true? 🤣

Illinois Physics at Quark Matter 2025! npl.illinois.edu/news/npl_qm25

Excited to see this paper that was a many, many year journey finally published! We introduce our Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic code CCAKE that has 3 conserved charges with shear and bulk viscosity. We explore gluons splitting into quark anti-quark pairs. journals.aps.org/prc/abstract...

At the largest conference for high-energy nuclear theory, Quark Matter, Illinois Physics+alum had a strong showing: 1 plenary speaker (Riccardo Longo), many talks+posters, best theory talk from a grad student (Nicki Mullins) & 2 EPJ Featured Talks (Isabella Danhoni, Khwahish Kushwah)

New paper day! 4D equation of state for strongly interacting matter with extended coverage from first principles! www.arxiv.org/abs/2504.01881

I’m not sure if I’m cheering for LSU or UCLA but I’m here for all the drama in this game! Got to love the women’s March Madness

If you are at the @apsphysics.bsky.social #GlobalSummit this week, check out these two mini-symposia tomorrow, which contain a lot of exciting results from the MUSES collaboration and feature many of my students and collaborators!

What happens to quarks and gluons at high temperatures and densities? Very fun to hear about the early days and see Illinois’ own Gordon Baym’s figure in Larry McLerran’s plenary on TD Lee and Bjoeken

At the APS GPS meeting for plenary talks on TD Lee and Bjoerken. It astounds me is how much more $$ (relatively) professors had. Bjorken had multiple homes while TD Lee bought expensive art & brought famous cooks to the US. On 2 prof. salaries, we're just trying to pay daycare & afford college

Well actually, it’s with Canadian Geese here in Illinois but same idea

New paper day! Very excited about this collaboration. Chec it out! arxiv.org/abs/2503.03057

Watching the Illinois USC women’s basketball game now. I know we’re definitely the underdogs here, but it’s amazing how they’re holding their own with so many injuries. Go Illini!

I can't wait!!! physics.illinois.edu/news/Bell-Bu...

New paper day! We provide a new constraint on the location of the QCD critical point, based on a novel method developed within the MUSES collaboration, and on an equation of state with improved precision. arxiv.org/abs/2502.10267

Our first MUSES software release is now finally public! We have neutron star and heavy-ion equations of state! We also have modules to calculate neutron star observables and their viscosities!

Hey, just showed up here, who's interested in quarks?