WYOMISSING, Pa. — The 10th annual Penn State Berks Losoncy Lecture in Physics and Astronomy will be presented by Rosi Reed, associate professor of physics at Lehigh University.
Reed will present “A Recipe for Quark Soup: Understanding the Primordial Broth at the Beginning of the Universe” on Wednesday, April 5. There will be a reception beginning at 4 p.m. in the college’s Freyberger Gallery and the lecture begins at 4:30 p.m. in the Perkins Student Center Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.
The lecture series is named in honor of George J. Losoncy, a retired Penn State Berks maintenance employee who donated $50,000 to establish a research endowment in physics and astronomy at Penn State Berks.
According to Reed: Shortly after the Big Bang, ordinary particles like protons and neutrons did not exist due to the incredibly hot temperature and high pressure present at the beginning of the Universe. Their building blocks, quarks and gluons, flowed in a hot, primordial soup. This nearly perfect liquid, known as the quark-gluon plasma, can be recreated in the laboratory by colliding heavy nuclei at nearly the speed of light.
Reed will discuss what we can learn about the structure of the universe from little droplets of matter with the hottest temperature, highest vorticity, and largest magnetic fields created in the laboratory.
Reed earned a doctorate in experimental high-energy nuclear physics from the University of California, Davis. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University and then held a position as an assistant professor of research at Wayne State University. Reed joined the faculty at Lehigh University in 2015.
Her main research focus is using particle jets as probes of the quark-gluon plasma. Reed is an NSF CAREER award winner, a member of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, an RHIC/AGS Merit Award winner, and a member of the STAR, sPHENIX, and ePIC Collaborations.
For more information about this lecture or the Losoncy Lecture Series, contact Leonard Gamberg, Penn State Berks professor of physics and event organizer, at 610-396-6124 or LPG10@psu.edu.