Matthias Grosse Perdekamp
Associate Professor of Physics and RIKEN Faculty Fellow
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, where he will retain the title RIKEN Fellow through 2007.
Professor Grosse Perdekamp is a high-energy nuclear physics experimentalist who is a key member of the PHENIX experiment at RHIC. The PHENIX collaboration, which includes 460 physicists and engineers from 57 institutions in 12 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 250-GeV proton beams at the RHIC collider to perform spin-dependent measurements at the highest scales yet explored. At RHIC, PHENIX is also investigating transversity through transverse single-spin-asymmetry measurements involving both the Collins and interference fragmentation functions. Professor Grosse Perdekamp spearheaded the idea to perform these measurements at RHIC and has demonstrated their feasibility at the present RHIC design luminosity.
Research Areas : Experimental high-energy nuclear physics; nucleon structure; spin-dependent structure of the proton; quark transversity distribution in the proton; spin dependent quark fragmentation functions.
Description of Current Research:
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. For this purpose, we have joined the Belle experiment at KEK, Tsukuba, Japan . We are presently attempting to extract Collins and two-hadron-interference fragmentation functions from Belle data taken at the Japanese b-factory at KEK.
Recent Publications:
Mid-Rapidity Neutral Pion Production in Proton Proton Collisions at √s = 200 GeV, PHENIX collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 241803 (2003).
Absence of Suppression in Particle Production at Large Transverse Momentum in √sNN = 200 GeV d+Au Collisions, PHENIX collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 072303 (2003).
Double Helicity Asymmetry in Inclusive Mid-Rapidity Neutral Pion Production for Polarized p+p Collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV, PHENIX collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 202002 (2004).
Mid-Rapidity Direct-Photon Production in p+p Collisions at √s = 200 GeV, PHENIX collaboration, Phys. Rev. D 71, 071102 (2005).
Measurement of azimuthal asymmetries in inclusive production of hadron pairs in e+e- annihilation at Belle, Belle collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 232002 (2006).
Honors and Awards
RIKEN Fellow, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), 2002–07
