My research effort is focused to the study of nuclear matter.

The properties of nuclear matter are fairly well understood near normal density. Nuclear matter is made of point-like quarks and gluons, which seem to be confined inside hadrons such as protons and neutrons. When nuclear matter become compressed or heated, it must undergo a change of phase to a new state of matter, the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), in which quarks and gluons are free to move about within a confinement volume much larger than hadronic sizes.

Quark Gluon Plasma has also a connection to astrophysics. Due to the enormous densities and temperatures prevailing during the first microseconds after Big Bang, quarks and gluons should, in the early universe, have moved around freely. During the expansion temperatures and densities decreased and the matter today found in the universe was created.

Quark Gluon Plasma is also created in collisions at high energy particle accelerators like the  Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Long Island about 65 miles East of New York City and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. Currently my research effort is focusing on two projects:

1. The ATLAS experiment at CERN, my research group is studying quarkonium and jet prodiction in heavy ion collisions to quantify how the Quark Gluon Plasma modifies the production rate of quarkonia and jets.
2. The sPHENIX experiment at BNL that is under construction at BNL and will start to take data in 2023 with the goal of characterizing quarkonia and jet a lower energy and use the complementarity to the LHC data to study the energy evolution of these effects.