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A Firestreak hits MSU: The early years

Barbara JacakFebruary 9, 2011

Back to the futurewith Gary!

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Gary has looked for phase transitions for quite a while!

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Gary didn’t have a collider!

Collisions at 10-1000 MeV/nucleon to vaporize nuclei The medium he wanted to study had vcm ≠ 0

vTARGET= 0

v = vBEAM

Firestreak model

Expect vT & T gradients!

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Gary streaks over to MSU

And there he finds…

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Story telling

Gary is very practiced at this

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A story Gary used to tell

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Always take a friend

especially one withall sorts of good

stuff in hispockets

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Haunted houses are dangerous!

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The LBL Bevalac

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The low energy beam line

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Low Energy Beam Line Counting House

In 1982

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Doing an experiment has evolved

Driven by the science and required complexity to tackle those questions!

Now: a multi-year programmany topics and papers from each year’s running

Then: A week or two of taking dataone (or two) PRL + a PRC with complete results and

details+ one or two Ph.D. theses

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My first PRL

Wrote the first draft

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Gave/sent to the collaborators

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And then…

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hound the collaborators

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Finally everyone agreed!

Ask the secretary to type up a clean copy. Send it off to The Physical Review Editor

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Gary was ahead of his time!

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Moving Source fits

Collective motion: a common vL

of the particle source

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Precursor to the blast wave

Borrowed from Olga Barannikova

Collective motion: a common radial expansion of the particle source

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Can produce nuclei as heavy as

nitrogen via coalescence of protons and neutrons

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We’re still coalescing things!

Greco, Ko, Levai: PRC 68 (2003)034904Baryon enhancement explained by recombination of thermal quarks from an expanding quark gluon plasma.

cc coalesce at freezeout → J/y

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More lessons

Gary teaches his students lots of things

One is audience “management”recall talk from Anne Sickles (Westfall REU student) on Monday

I learned Never show slides that you don’t 100% understand the

contents ofIt’s important to keep the audience awakeThey’re usually awake if they’re laughing

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A final word

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Happy Birthday to The Whooper!!!