Welcome to my personal homepage!
I am an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Houston. My investigations mainly concern the properties of strongly interacting QCD matter under extreme conditions such as those realized in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions and neutron stars.
Previously, I had obtained my Master degree in Physics at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in Ukraine, a PhD degree at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, and then held appointments as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow in the Nuclear Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington.
Here you can find information about my research, publications, talks, and projects.
PhD in Theoretical Physics, 2018
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
MSc in Physics, 2013
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine
BSc in Physics, 2011
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine
Research and Education
The position is also known as Junior INT Fellow.
Theoretical research of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions.
Theoretical research of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions:
Funded by the Feodor Lynen Program of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.
Theoretical research of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions:
Teaching:
PhD work Quantum statistical van der Waals equation and its QCD applications with Prof. Dr. Horst Stoecker at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Goethe University Frankfurt and Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies
Software development for cash registers
Funded through a grant of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine
Phenomenology of heavy-ion collisions
Lattice QCD calculations at finite temperature and zero or small baryon chemical potential have shown that there is no phase transition separating quasi-free quarks and those confined in baryons. Quarkyonic matter is a hypothetical state where quarks and baryons can coexist in a single Fermi sphere; quarks occupy the low momenta levels, hadrons the high momenta ones. This paper puts forward the idea that normal nuclear matter may, in fact, be quarkyonic and that the existence of this exotic phase may already have been seen in current electron-nucleus scattering data.
We present a dynamical description of (anti)proton number cumulants and correlation functions in central Au-Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7–200$ GeV by utilizing viscous hydrodynamics simulations. We find that the experimental data of the STAR Collaboration are consistent at sNN≳20GeV with simultaneous effects of global baryon number conservation and repulsive interactions in the baryon sector. The data at lower collision energies show possible indications for sizable attractive interactions among baryons.
The conditions for the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensed phase of pions in the early Universe are determined. Utilizing a hadron resonance gas model with pion interactions constrained to first-principle lattice QCD simulations at nonzero isospin density, we evaluate cosmic trajectories at various values of electron, muon, and tau lepton asymmetries that satisfy the available constraints on the total lepton asymmetry. The cosmic trajectory passes through the pion condensed phase if the combined electron and muon asymmetry is sufficiently large: |le + lμ| > 0.1, with little sensitivity to the difference le − lμ between the individual flavor asymmetries. Future constraints on the values of the individual lepton flavor asymmetries will thus be able to either confirm or rule out the condensation of pions during the cosmic QCD epoch. We demonstrate that the pion condensed phase leaves an imprint both on the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves and on the mass distribution of primordial black holes at the QCD scale, for example, the black hole binary of recent LIGO event GW190521 can be formed in that phase.
Saha equation approach is introduced for describing the production of light (anti-)(hyper-)nuclei in late stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, making use of an analogy between the evolution of the early universe after the Big Bang and that of ``Little Bangs’’ created in the lab. The framework is consistent with the available experimental data of the ALICE collaboration for a very broad range of temperatures in the hadronic phase, providing a possible explanation for why the thermal model works so well for describing nuclear abundances in heavy-ion collisions.
This paper introduces the Cluster Expansion Model (CEM) – a model for QCD equation of state at finite baryon density, which is based on the lattice QCD data for Fourier coefficients of baryon number density, obtained in simulation at imaginary $\mu_B$. The CEM is surprisingly simple, permits a closed analytic form, and is consistent with all presently available lattice data.
An extension of the ideal hadron resonance gas (HRG) model is constructed which includes the attractive and repulsive van der Waals (VDW) interactions between baryons. This VDW-HRG model yields the nuclear liquid-gas transition and, compared to the ideal HRG model, leads to a qualitatively different behavior of second and higher moments of fluctuations of conserved charges, in particular in the so-called crossover region $T$~$140–190$ MeV. For many observables this behavior resembles closely the results obtained from lattice QCD simulations.
This paper introduces the Quantum van der Waals (QvdW) equation – a generalization of the famous van der Waals equation to include quantum statistical (Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein) effects. The formalism is applied to describe the nuclear liquid-gas transition in nuclear matter.
Courses taught
This is the list of courses that I taught as well useful links.
Taught at the Physics Department of the University of Houston
Here you can find my coding projects, which include code for high energy physics applications and also several Android apps that model and visualize different physical systems with OpenGL on an Android device.
*Molecular dynamics simulation and visualization of the Lennard-Jones system utilizing CUDA-enabled GPU’s
A C++ package designed for the convenient general-purpose analysis within a family of hadron resonance gas (HRG) models.
Reference: Comput. Phys. Commun. 244, 295 (2019)
An Android app to visualize the wave functions of the three-dimensional harmonic oscillator.
10,000+ installs / 4.8 rating
An Android app to visualize the electron orbitals of the hydrogen atom in 3D.
10,000+ installs / 4.7 rating
An Android app to simulate the motion of nine different pendulum systems in real time.
50,000+ installs / 4.7 rating