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Updated: May 20, 2026

Laser-heating and Radiance Spectrometry for the Study of Nuclear Materials in Conditions Simulating a Nuclear Power Plant Accident
Published on: December 14, 2017
The exploration of hot nuclear matter
Barbara V Jacak1, Berndt Müller
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA.
Abstract:
When nuclear matter is heated beyond 2 trillion degrees, it becomes a strongly coupled plasma of quarks and gluons. Experiments using highly energetic collisions between heavy nuclei have revealed that this new state of matter is a nearly ideal, highly opaque liquid. A description based on string theory and black holes in five dimensions has made the quark-gluon plasma an archetypical strongly coupled quantum system. Open questions about the structure and theory of the quark-gluon plasma are under active investigation. Many of the insights are also relevant to ultracold fermionic atoms and strongly correlated condensed matter.
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