Michael Lisa

Michael Lisa, professor in the Department of Physics, was awarded a prestigious 2019-2020 Fulbright Scholar Research Grant to Brazil.

Lisa will travel to the Universidade Estadual de Campinas - Instituto de Fisica in Campinas, Brazil, in March – April 2020 and June – July 2020. He will conduct research for his project “Exploring Extreme Vortex Formation in High Nuclear Collisions” which springs from a discovery he published in “Nature” in 2017 and reveals swirling substructure in the flow field of tiny hydrodynamic systems created in nuclear collisions at relativistic speeds.

“That discovery – which was the thesis topic of Ohio State PhD student Isaac Upsal – had a huge impact on the worldwide field of relativistic heavy ion physics, opening the door to an entirely new aspect of the so-called quark-gluon plasma,” Lisa said. “The quark-gluon plasma last existed in nature about three microseconds after the Big Bang, and now we recreate it at huge accelerator facilities like the LHC in Europe and RHIC at Brookhaven Laboratory, New York. Ohio State has been a leading institution in this field.”

Lisa said he will be expanding the study of quark-gluon plasma vorticity both experimentally and theoretically. The theory work will be in conjunction with Giorgio Torrieri, a leading theorist at Campina.

For more information about the Fulbright Scholar Program, contact Joanna Kukielka-Blaser.