Profs. Mueller and Bass awarded Topical Collaboration Grant

Duke professors Berndt Mueller and Steffen Bass are playing leading roles in a multi-institutional team that was recently awarded Department Of Energy (DOE) funding for a Topical Collaboration on "Jet and Electromagnetic Tomography in Heavy-Ion Collisions." The JET Collaboration, which includes theorists from eight institutions in the U.S. and Canada, was among the first three topical collaborations in nuclear theory to be awarded in this new program of the DOE Office of Science. Mueller serves as one of two co-spokespersons of the collaboration; the other is former Duke postdoc Xin-Nian Wang, now at LBNL. The award is for a total of five years.

The JET Collaboration will develop next-generation models of the interactions of high-energy quarks, gluons, and photons with ultra-dense and ultra-hot nuclear matter. In addition to providing a structure for collaborative work and know-how transfer among both theorists and experimentalists, the Collaboration will also offer annual summer schools for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows on techniques that are required to carry out many of the proposed theoretical studies. The announcement of the award can be found at the Department of Energy website.