Our views of the universe have evolved in recent years by astronomical observations and experimental measurements performed in laboratories. We now have a better understanding of its initial conditions. In this course, we will be discussing what the universe is made of and what holds it together. Knowledge from various subfields of physics including nuclear, particle, quantum and astrophysics is required to describe the universe, especially its first three minutes. These initial minutes are very important as all major building blocks of our universe e.g., hydrogen atoms were formed during that time. As an experimental nuclear physicist who is studying the conditions that existed one millionth of a second after the big bang in the laboratory, my plan is to incorporate active research topics to this course in coherent units where a concept used in research is introduced in a discussion, illustrated in a (multi-media) demonstration, and familiarized as a real-world example in an assignment.
Weekly topics will include: Introduction & Scientific Theory, Experimental Methods, The Big Bang, Expanding Universe, Relativity, Curved Space, Particle Era, Quark Gluon Plasma, Era of Nucleosynthesis, Quantum Gravity & String Theory, Universe vs. Multiverse, Future Investigations. The underlying concepts of these topics will be covered at a level that can be followed by non-major undergraduate students with no prerequisite science classes, although prospective science majors are welcomed.
About Professor Salur
Professor Sevil Salur joined Rutgers in 2011. Before coming to Rutgers, she was a researcher at UC Davis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Yale University. She studies experimental high-energy nuclear physics and investigates the properties of strongly interacting, hot and dense matter produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY. This dense matter, a soup of quarks and gluons, was present 0.000001 seconds after the Big Bang. It is re-created by collisions of nuclei at nearly the speed of light through a phase transition similar to the way that ice cubes melt to form liquid water. Professor Salur and her research group are working to determine the quantitative properties of this quark-gluon matter.