Jaki Noronha-Hostler

Criticality in Nature’s Strongest Force Experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider give the first hints of a critical point in the hot quark–gluon “soup” that is thought to have pervaded the infant Universe.

Recent write-up from me on the STAR collaboration's exciting new results for the search for the QCD critical point!

physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

New method to find sub-threshold binary neutron star mergers from gravitational waves AND they found one!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

Yay!!!!

Is this about Columbia? I had the pleasure of being pregnant there and not having a bathroom in my floor 😭

Thanks!

Virtually attending the talk of Mateus Reinke Pelicer, who is presenting the MUSES cyberinfrastructure at the INT today.

Anyway, there was probably an even worse example I didn’t mention that was it cited a random STAR paper for the beam energy Scan’s search for the critical point, rather than the more obvious net-proton fluctuations paper or some of the review papers out there.

I think it depends on wording. If it’s about the discovery itself (in the context of this sentence it was) then the original should be cited, but if it’s the context of the state of the art later work should be. It just depends on what someone is trying to convey.

To give an example in my field, for the cross-over from the Quark Gluon Plasma to a hadron resonance gas it did not cite the proper 2006 Nature paper but other papers that came out 5-10 years later. They confirmed the previous result with better error bars, but are not the same thing.

I just ran a recent paper that I'm writing through chatGPT to see if I was missing any obvious references. Dear lord, I hope nobody is relying on it for references! 😱 It suggested that would have been "right enough" for or a non-expert, but would have been very misleading.

New group photo, feels like we're starring in drama series!

2025 Annual RHIC & AGS Users' Meeting Celebrates Past and Looks to the Future Sessioins cover 25 years of discoveries at RHIC; latest findings and challenges; path to the EIC; posters, awards, and more!

There's a few quotes from me at the very end :)

www.bnl.gov/newsroom/new...

Oxygen and neon collisions at the LHC for the first time ever 🚀

On 1 July, the four large #LHC experiments recorded particle collisions between oxygen and proton beams for the first time ever. Last week, they went a step further with oxygen-oxygen and neon-neon collisions.

ATLAS takes a breath of oxygen The ATLAS Experiment at CERN dives into uncharted waters, recording its first-ever collisions of oxygen and neon ions. These are not your typical heavy-ion collisions. Oxygen and neon nuclei are far s...

Yay!! 🥳
Also, nice to see Illinois Physicist Riccardo Longo getting interviewed!

atlas.cern/Updates/News...

Thanks for putting together a great meeting!

2025 Saturated Glue (SURGE) Collaboration Meeting at UCLA — thank you all for making it so productive!

Great to reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. Exciting progress, new energy, and a bright future ahead. Let’s keep moving forward together 💪💪🙏🙏

Caught the Botafogo-Atletico Madrid game over the lunch break at our SURGE collaboration meeting in LA. Both the meeting and the game were awesome!

Vai pra cima deles mengo! 🥳 🥅+⚽ 🥅+⚽ 🥅+⚽

I’m cheering so hard for Botafogo right now! 📣

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

Dead stars that can be up to a million times hotter than the sun are effective "zero temperatures" for everything that I care about. 😱

To be clear, this was a paper that was quite foundational to my PhD thesis, which makes it all the more entertaining to see a bit of history play out.

Why am I amused by this? Up and down quark masses are only a few MeV whereas the mass of the proton/neutron are almost 1000 MeV. Thus, he's off by about a factor of 1000 in his estimates :)
That factor of a 1000 comes from gluons (both self interactions and with the quarks)

It goes on to say that maybe a minimum quark mass of 5 times that of the protons/neutrons might be large enough. I'm not sure when QCD was understood well enough in the community to know the difference between dressed/bare quarks, but it must not have been well-understood back in 1968 by Hagedorn.

Rereading Rolf Hagedorn's famous paper on Hagedorn states/statistical bootstrap model and am very amused by this intro

Not good news for gravitational-wave or multimessenger astronomy "In FY 2026 NSF will operate only one of the two [LIGO] sites and will support a reduced level for technology development"

☄️⚛️🧪🔭

New paper out! How does the initial state in heavy-ion collisions at large densities translate into flow observables? We develop a new way to quantify the geometrical shape of these initial states and show this strongly correlates to the final state flow observables!

arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16038

I got to pretend to be an experimentalists a bit and see sPHENIX! They even let me in the hard hat area.:D It's so cool to see where the magic happens

What happens to science under autocracy? The rise of the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany provides an (admittedly extreme) example. Prior to the early 1930s, scientists at German institutions won a third of Nobels. 10 years later, that number was 5%, and has never recovered.

And how their call systems are purposely designed so badly to make you frustrated such that you give up and don't speak to an actual human.