Links to undergraduate class information:

PHY2130: General Physics I (Fall 08) (Lecture Hall Evening Course)

PHY2140: General Physics II (Fall 06) (Oakland Extension Center Evening Course)

Links to graduate class information:

PHY8800: Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics (Winter 07)

I am a Professor at the WSU Physics and Astronomy department. My field of research is Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics, which is a specialized sub-field of Nuclear Physics. My group is trying to unfold the evolution of the universe in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. If you want to know how our research connects to cosmology, please take the Cosmic Mystery Tour . A beautiful introduction into the relation between the Big Bang and our 'Mini-Bang' research can also be found in Dr. Claude Pruneau's power point presentation: The Mini-bang: Search for the Quark Gluon Plasma .
I recently gave a colloquium for our graduate students aimed at explaining some of the details of our research to potential new Ph.D. candidates You can find the link here: The Big Bang in the laboratory .
In the Winter 07 semester I decided to teach a graduate course in Relativistic Heavy Ion physics. Please follow this weblink to find my notes and reading assignments. My group conducts its research at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island. From 1992 - 2000 we have designed, constructed, and installed a detector for the STAR experiment for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) . RHIC started to record data in May 00. Exciting pictures of the first events recorded can be found on the STAR web-site (see above). Our detector is called the Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) and is based on a novel semiconductor technology called Silicon Drift Detectors. The SVT was installed in STAR in January 2001. The collaboration building the SVT consisted of 11 national and international institutions (Wayne State University, Ohio State University, University of Texas (Austin), Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), Dubna Nuclear Research Institute (Russia), Protvino High Energy Research Institute (Russia), University of Warsaw (Poland), SUBATECH Nantes (France), INRS Strasbourg (France)), with about 50 collaborators. WSU was the lead institution.We are now almost eight years into our program and have discovered an exciting new state of matter, commonly labeled the 'Quark Soup' . I have summarized our latest results in a recent (April 2008) colloquium at William and Mary named: The Liquid Universe - How RHIC illuminates the creation of matter As of this year, my group has joined the ALICE experiment at the LHC. ALICE is the only dedicated heavy ion experiment at the LHC, but over the past few years both CMS and ATLAS have also decided to participate in the one month of heavy ion running per year. So all three experiments will have heavy exciting heavy ion results, hopefully starting in 2009. The first proton-proton beam is scheduled for this year. Part of the public outreach project for the LHC is a US-LHC web-page that includes a lively blog site, which features my weekly blog on ALICE and other related science issues . Special research interests in our group include strangeness physics and charm physics. An exciting spin-off application for our Silicon detectors is in medical imaging . Our group presently consists of:
Rene Bellwied (Professor), bellwied@physics.wayne.edu
Anthony Timmins (Postdoctoral Research Associate), tone421@rcf.rhic.bnl.gov
Chanaka DeSilva (Ph.D. graduate student), desilva@physics.wayne.edu
Sarah LaPointe (Ph.D. graduate student), lapointe@physics.wayne.edu
Johnathon Markus (Undergraduate Research Assistant), jmarkus@physics.wayne.edu
Sook Hwang (Undergraduate Research Assistant), hwangs@physics.wayne.edu If you want to learn more about our research, click on any of the links on this page or get in touch with me. (Phone:313-577-5407, FAX: 313-577-3932, e-mail: bellwied@physics.wayne.edu). List of my main presentations in the last five years List of my main publications in the last five years Presentations in jpg and ppt Some more general CV information Teaching Portfolio Due to multiple requests: The Famous Yale Picture

Link to reading material for graduate students:

New and relevant papers in Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics