The Kent State University Department of Physics is proud to welcome our newest faculty member, Dr. Zhangbu Xu. Dr. Xu comes to us from Brookhaven National Laboratory. His focus is on the experimental study of high-energy nuclear physics, including the quark-gluon plasma and the structure of nucleons and nuclei. Dr. Xu is a previous spokesperson for the STAR experiment at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and has published over 320 papers, which have received approximately 43,000 citations.
At Kent State University, Dr. Xu will continue his work on ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions and lead our experimental program as RHIC transforms into the future Electron Ion Collider (EIC) facility, which is expected to be operational in approximately 7 years from now. Dr. Xu's work at Kent State University is funded by the US Department of Energy, with the current funding expected to be renewed in June 2024. Thus far, for the forthcoming EIC, Dr. Xu has been made the lead manager for the construction of the time-of-flight (TOF) subsystem in the ePIC detector, which is a $30 million dollar project. Together with other faculty from Kent State's Center For Nuclear Research (CNR) Dr. Xu has been able to secure membership in the ePIC collaboration, which paves the way for Kent State's continued involvement in high-energy nuclear physics for at least the next decade.