Undergraduates
Why does the space shuttle returning to Earth cause two separate sonic booms?
Professor Grosse Perdekamp received his diplom in physics from Freiburg University in 1990, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1995. He was an associate research scientist at Yale University from 1995 to 1998, and a research scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, from 1998 to 1999. Most recently, he was a RIKEN Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) facility. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in 2002 remaining a Fellow at RIKEN through 2007.
Professor Grosse Perdekamp is a high-energy nuclear physics experimentalist who is a member of the PHENIX experiment at RHIC. The PHENIX collaboration, which includes 498 physicists and engineers from 70 institutions in 14 countries, engages in a broad program of studying QCD phenomena at RHIC, including the physics of heavy ion collisions, the spin-dependent structure of the proton in polarized proton-proton collisions, and the study of nucleon structure in a nuclear environment in proton- or deuteron-ion collisions.
He has taken a leadership role in PHENIX's spin-physics program, which will employ the polarization of the proton beams at the RHIC collider to perform spin-dependent measurements at the highest energy scales yet explored. Important components of his research interest are the study of transverse spin pheonomena and the preparation of spin physics program with W-boson at RHIC.
The current research of our PHENIX group at UIUC focuses on the exploration of spin dependent proton substructure. RHIC is the first accelerator capable of colliding polarized proton beams at high energies and high intensities. A wealth of spin-dependent processes in polarized proton-proton collisions at RHIC will give access to the individual spin contributions of quarks and gluons to the proton spin. It is my particular interest to explore the distribution functions of quarks in transversely polarized protons.
In addition to my work on proton sub-structure in PHENIX, I am leading an effort to precisely determine spin dependent quark fragmentation functions from e + e - annihilation into quark-antiquark pairs. These functions are needed as input for the transverse spin program at RHIC and elsewhere. For this purpose, we have joined the Belle experiment at KEK, Tsukuba, Japan . We have successfully measured and published asymmetries in Collins fragmentation and focus now on two-hadron-interference fragmentation functions from Belle data taken at the Japanese b-factory at KEK.