Department of Physics

Dr. Papavassiliou conducts accelerator-based research in experimental high-energy nuclear and particle physics, with emphasis on the structure of the nucleon and the strong interaction. Dr. Papavassiliou is a participant in the PHENIX (Brookhaven) experiment at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, which is searching for evidence for the formation, under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, of a new state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. He also has a keen interest in the study of the internal spin structure of the proton, and especially the role played by gluons, which can be studied in polarized proton-nucleus collisions at the same accelerator. Dr. Papavassiliou recently completed an experiment studying the production of muon pairs in proton-nucleus collisions, which showed, among many interesting result, that up and down quark-antiquark pairs exhibit pronounced differences in their properties as components of the nucleon.