May 8, 2006

Physicist pens cover story for Scientific American

The May issue of Scientific American features a cover story on high-energy particle physics by Michael Riordan, adjunct professor of physics, and William Zajc of Columbia University.

Titled "The First Few Microseconds," the story is about the recent discovery of a liquid-like plasma of quarks and gluons at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). The early universe is now believed to have consisted of such a plasma during the first few microseconds of the Big Bang. This research finding was rated as the most important physics discovery of 2005 by the American Institute of Physics.