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

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

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!

It goes on to say that maybe a minimum quark mass of 5 times that of the protons/neutrons might be large enough. I'm not sure when QCD was understood well enough in the community to know the difference between dressed/bare quarks, but it must not have been well-understood back in 1968 by Hagedorn.

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

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

The original symmetry energy expansion was created to study nuclear matter i.e. just protons and neutrons. That means it works well for densities on the scale of the nucleus. But at higher densities strange particles may appear and there if fails miserably! Why is that?

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)

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

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