Prize Recipient

Matthew W. Luzum
Institut de Physique Theorique, France

Citation:

"For pioneering developments int he theory of relativistic viscous hydrodynamics, in particular for the implementation of stable numerical simulations that have been used to quantify the low value of the shear viscosity coefficient observed in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at RHIC, with important implications for the near-perfect fluidity of the quark-gluon plasma."

Background:

Matthew Luzum received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 2003 from Saint John's University in Minnesota, and his Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Washingon.  Currently he is working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de physique theorique (CEA/Saclay) in France.  His research interests relate to phenomenology of relativistic heavy ion collisions.  In particular, he used viscous hydrodynamic models to extract information about the shear viscosity of the quarkgluon plasma from collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven, and to predict the results of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.  Currently, he continues to study data from RHIC as well as new data from the LHC,
which recently began colliding heavy ions.