Margetis, Spiros

Associate Professor
Director, Center for Nuclear Research

Office: 313 Smith Hall

330-672-9739 (FAX: 2959)
margetis "at" star.physics.kent.edu

Research Interests:

Dr. Margetis' current research involves collisions of heavy nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies, as they offer unique opportunities to study the behavior of nuclear matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density. This research is currently carried on at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) in Geneva, as well as at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a Department of Energy project in Long Island, New York. It is expected that inside the resulting hot and dense nuclear matter the nucleon boundaries will `meltdown' and their constituents (quarks and gluons) will be free to move over the extended volume of the `fireball'. This `deconfined' phase of nuclear matter is usually referred to as ``Quark Gluon Plasma'', the discovery of which is our primary goal. Such matter is believed to have been formed during the ``Big Bang'', when the Universe was just a few microseconds old. It might also exist in the core of a neutron star or other exotic astronomical objects.

Dr. Margetis is affiliated with two major experiments. The CERN-NA49 experiment and the RHIC experiment STAR. Both experiments use multi-purpose detectors aiming at measuring many different signals simultaneously. His physics interests are in the area of `strangeness', i.e. the production rates and behavior of strange matter inside hot nuclear matter. A particle is called `strange' if one of its constituent quarks is the strange quark (ordinary matter contains only `up' and/or `down' quarks). An example of a strange particle is the Lambda hyperon. The detection of these particles is extremely difficult and high precision detectors combined with accurate tracking software is required. Dr. Margetis and his students are making contributions to the software infrastructure of the experiment as well as the physics analysis. Students in his group will have the option to spend extended periods of time at an accelerator laboratory where they can be exposed to a mixture of software and/or hardware tasks. Unique skills ranging from setting up Monte Carlo simulations to detector development and improvement can be acquired during this work, skills which can later be used in search for employment after graduation.

Return to KSU Physics