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Research interests

Stephen Cotanch's research centers on theoretical studies of hadronic and nuclear structure. His goal is to yield deeper insight by confronting field theoretic calculations that incorporate important symmetries with precision data from accelerators such as Jefferson Lab. His program includes developing improved renormalizable QCD models incorporating chiral symmetry, the phenomenology of hybrid mesons and glueballs, electromagnetic studies of strangeness in protons and nuclei, and many-body techniques for hadronic physics. These projects involve continuing collaborations with experimentalists at JLAB and the Svedberg Laboratory in Uppsala, Sweden, and Dr. Cotanch is a consultant at both facilities. He also works closely with theorists at the Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal where he is a continuing visitor.

Chueng-Ryong Ji's research focuses on theoretical predictions for the structure and spectra of ordinary, strange, charm, and bottom mesons and baryons. This includes exotic molecular aspects as well as glueball components. To construct a realistic hadronic model consistent with experimental data, relativity is explicitly realized by taking into account the symmetries of the lightcone, unitarity, duality, and the discrete symmetries C, P, and T. One primary interest is to investigate the nonperturbative vacuum of QCD using many body techniques and effective field theory. Dr. Ji is currently a member of the International Light Cone Advisory Committee (ILCAC) and has been a theory consultant for JLAB and Seoul National University. His research with several graduate students has attracted SURA fellowships in recent years.

Dean Lee's research includes topics in quantum field theory and many body theory. He is interested in effective field theory, lattice methods for many body physics, quantum Monte Carlo, nuclear and neutron matter, cold atomic Fermi gases, spontaneous symmetry breaking, Bose-Einstein condensation, and superfluidity.

Gail McLaughlin's research is in theoretical nuclear and particle astrophysics. She studies the way in which nuclear reactions and subatomic particles affect astrophysical objects and vice-versa. She is particularily interested in supernovae, which are the end states of massive stars, and gamma ray bursts, which still have an unknown origin. For example, she studies how detecting neutrinos from supernovae could tell us both about the conditions in supernovae and also about fundamental properties of neutrinos. She is also interested in how and where elements are formed. For example, she models environments which could produce gamma ray bursts with the goal of explaining recent detections of iron in their spectra.

Thomas Schaefer's research interests include the QCD phase diagram, color superconductivity, the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, kaon condensation, large-N_c QCD, high-density effective theory, instantons, the physics of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisisons, many body theory, and hadronic physics.