My research focuses on studying the quark-gluon liquid at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory using the STAR detector. At RHIC, we collide gold nuclei at center-of-mass energies of up to 200 GeV per nucleon pair. At this energy, the protons and neutrons in the incident nuclei are transformed into a hot, dense, and strongly interacting liquid of quarks and gluons. This quark-gluon liquid is a nearly perfect liquid, which has nearly zero viscosity as evidenced by the comparison of flow measurements to hydrodynamic calculations. The universe is thought to have existed in this form a few microseconds after the big bang.
