Prof. Sukalyan Chattopadhyay

Research

The broad area of my research interst is experimental Nuclear Physics. In recent years, I have been working on two specific areas: Nuclear Structure studies at low energies and investigation of properties of matter at Ultra-relativistic Heavy Ion Collision. Nuclear Structure studies are carried out at the various accelarator centers of our country. In these studies, nuclei at high angular momentum are produced through fusion-evaporation reactions between target nuclei and the heavy nuclei which are accelarated by these accelarators. The detail spectroscopic measurements on the high spin states of nuclei of interest help us to identify various mechanisms which lead to the formation of these states. In recent years a number of intersting phenomena have been identified in mass-100 region by our group. The Ultra-relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions at 5.5 TeV per nucleon, will be carried out at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Our group is an active Collaborator at A Large Ion Collider Experiment (CERN). The experiment is completely ready and the initial proton-proton collisions are expected in November, 2009 and the Heavy Ion Collisions (Pb-Pb) are expected in 2010. These collisions (also known as Mini-Bangs) may lead to a completely new state of matter called Quark-Gluon Plasma. Understanding these collisions will be extremely challenging both in terms of experiment and theory.