The research participated by LUO Xiaofeng, a USTC Ph.D. Candidate, was listed in the Physics World 2011 Breakthrough of The Year, as Institute of Physics (IOP)announced on Dec 16. LUO Xiaofeng is second author in the paper "Scale for QCD Phase Diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics", published in Science 332, 1525 (2011).
Described as "Taking the temperature of the early universe", the research was listed 6th in the top 10 breakthroughs of 2011, as IOP commented "As well as providing important insights into the early universe, the work also advances our understanding of quantum chromodynamics, which describes the properties of neutrons, protons and other hadrons."
LUO besides STAR Detector /Copyright by LUO Xiaofeng
LUO is the only student in his research team. He was an undergraduate of USTC from 2002 to 2006 and was recommended admission to Department of Modern Physics of USTC in 2006 for Ph. D studies under the supervision of Prof. LI Cheng. LUO specializes in heavy ion collision physics and equation of state of nuclear matter.
The Corresponding author XU Nu is an alumnus of USTC.
In addition, four of the five authors of the paper come from "STAR Relativistic Heavy-ion Physics Research and Time-Of-Flight Detector R&D" project team, which is a successful China-US joint program.
From left to right: Bedangadas Mohanty, LUO Xiaofeng, XU Nu, Hans Georg Ritter/Copyright by themselves
You can read "Quark Soup" Cooking and Big Success of the Cooperation between Chinese and US High-Energy Nuclear Physics to get more information about the research and the STAR-TOF.