My list of papers with at least 250 citations each (from INSPIRE)

Citations summary

Quick search for all publications (most recent at the top)

Thanks to the outstanding postdocs and students in my group, I can point to these research highlights from the past few years:

• April 2013: former KSU postdoc Dr. Jinhui Chen has received his prestigious George Valley Prize from the American Physical Society at a ceremony this month in Denver.  This prize primarily recognizes his work on the discovery of the first antimatter nucleus containing a quark with the strangeness quantum number. The research was carried out during 2009 while he was a member of my group. Additional details are below under the item for Spring 2010.  It was an impressive ceremony, and even included his award citation appearing on the Jumbotron Screen at the baseball stadium (Coors Field) in Denver. 
  
• Early-2012: Discover magazine (affiliated with the Discovery Channel) ranked our anti-alpha work (see next bullet below) their #3 story for the year 2011 under physics and math, and their #20 story under all areas of science.
• April 2011: I gave the first conference talk on the discovery of the anti-alpha on behalf of the STAR collaboration.  This antimatter nucleus (also called anti-helium-4) is likely to remain the heaviest known stable antinucleus for decades to come (the next stable one would be about 3 million times rarer unless produced by a new and unknown mechanism). My former PhD student Aihong Tang, now a staff scientist at Brookhaven, was the main person coordinating the analysis details. Our measurements prove that if the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (a $2 billion experiment on the International Space Station) finds any anti-alpha particles in cosmic radiation, they cannot be understood as having been produced in cosmic nuclear collisions and would point to the presence of bulk antimatter in a remote region of the cosmos. Our anti-alpha discovery is published in the prestigious journal Nature. 
• Mid-2011: My PhD student Yadav Pandit won the award for "best poster" at the 2011 RHIC Users Meeting at Brookhaven National Lab.  The poster dealt with azimuthal anisotropy in nuclear collisions.
• Spring 2011: Kent State Distinguished Scholar Award.
• Spring 2010: My group spearheaded the discovery by STAR of the first antimatter nucleus containing a strange quark; this antinucleus consists of an antiproton, an antineutron and an anti-Lambda.  KSU postdoc Jinhui Chen was the main person implementing the analysis, and the discovery was published in the journal Science in March 2010.  I was the contact person quoted in a news story in Nature, in Scientific American, and in the news organ of the Institute of Physics (UK).  My favorite news item is the one which referred to us as “Topflight international reverse-alchemy boffins”.
• February 2010: A story in APS News (from the American Physical Society) looks back over the "Top Ten Physics Newsmakers of the Decade", and names the discovery of Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) as one of these top ten. Results on hydrodynamic behavior that first appeared in the dissertation of my PhD advisee Aihong Tang are considered among the more compelling pieces of evidence that support the QGP picture, and have been prominently featured in summaries of the discovery, e.g., in a paper which has been cited over 1600 times as of spring 2013.
• Spring 2008: My postdoc Mikhail Kopytine was recognized by the periodical Science Watch, in their March/April 2008 issue, as sharing first place in their world-wide ranking of researchers (covering every area of science) with the greatest number of "hot papers" in 2006-07. The previous year, Dr. Kopytine was jointly #2 in this ranking, but he since pulled ahead of the long-standing leader, Japanese Immunologist Shizuo Akira. It should be noted that the ranking used by Science Watch has no subjective input, and is based solely on the number of citations received by papers published in peer-reviewed journals.