Spotlight on new faculty: Jorge Jose Leite Noronha, Nuclear Physics

The Department of Physics at Illinois welcomes an extraordinary set of ten new faculty members this year. Eight of them have arrived on campus and have begun setting up their labs and settling into life in Champaign-Urbana. Two more faculty are set to arrive in January. We will feature each of them here over the next couple of weeks. Check back regularly to learn more about the exciting work these new faculty members are doing.

Professor Jorge Jose Leite Noronha

Jorge Noronha is a nuclear theorist whose primary interest is in the out-of-equilibrium behavior of relativistic systems under extreme conditions. The primary example of such a system is the quark-gluon plasma—the smallest and hottest most perfect fluid found in nature—which is formed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. His previous work has shed new light on the far-from-equilibrium dynamics of relativistic many-body systems. Jorge is perhaps best known for his work on the application of anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) techniques to the physics of the quark-gluon plasma, as well as for his contributions to the foundations of relativistic viscous fluid dynamics. At Illinois, his group is exploring “new real-time techniques to understand the out-of-equilibrium properties of the quark-gluon plasma, which is modeled as a black hole in higher dimensions using the AdS/CFT correspondence.” Jorge is always interested in the extreme: very small systems, very large temperatures, very large densities, or very strong gravitational fields. He says, “In physics, you always have to go to the extreme. You have accepted theories, and progress only happens when you go to the extreme and see where it all breaks down.” 

For more information about Jorge's work, or to inquire about joining his group, please click here.