Helmut Satz

Helmut Satz (born April 13, 1936 in Berlin ) is a German theoretical physicist who deals with the thermodynamics of strongly interacting matter.

Satz studied at Michigan State University and the University of Hamburg , where he received his doctorate in 1963 and completed his habilitation in 1967 ( on the statistical description of high-energy many-particle generation reactions ). He then went to Los Angeles , CERN in Geneva and Helsinki, among others . Satz has been Professor of Theoretical Physics at Bielefeld University since 1971 , where he - most recently dean of the department - retired in 2001. 1974 to 1981 he was on the board of directors of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University, 1975/76 and 1979/80 managing director. He was also a visiting scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL, 1985 to 1989) and at CERN , where he was theoretician of heavy ion impact experiments on leave from Bielefeld University from 1989 to 1995.

Satz dealt in particular with the physics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which is investigated during heavy ion collisions and which was the state of matter in the early days of the universe. The phase transition from hadron gas to quark-gluon gas takes place according to simulations with lattice range theories at around 10 ¹² Kelvin . The universe was in this state for about 10 microseconds about a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, before the hadrons condensed. When detecting the QGP in heavy ion collisions, one is dependent on various signatures, which together give indirect indications of the QGP, one of which comes from Satz and Tetsuo Matsui 1986, the suppression of the formation of J / particles (bound states of heavy quarks, here from Charm- and anticharm quarks), because figuratively speaking these begin to “melt” in the quark-gluon plasma. Based on such signatures, CERN announced the detection of quark-gluon plasma in 2000. Satz also developed applications of statistical physics (percolation) and astrophysics (Hawking radiation) for problems of strong interaction. ${\displaystyle \Psi }$

In Bielefeld he and his colleagues (such as Frithjof Karsch , who did his doctorate with him in 1982) also simulated quark-gluon plasmas with high-performance parallel computers that were specially developed for simulation in QCD. From 1992 to 1997 Bielefeld University coordinated the EU network Computational Particle Physics (and its successor Phase Transitions in Hot Matter ) and played a leading role in it. As a member of the European Computer Committee for Nuclear Physics NuPECC and Elementary Particle Physics ECFA, Satz was involved in the planning of high-performance computer centers. After his retirement, he was Gulbenkian Professor at the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, from 2002 to 2004.

From 1979 to 1986 he was editor of the journal for physics C. Satz has been a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences since 1994 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau / Wrocław in Poland since 2014 .

Fonts

• Editor: Many degrees of freedom in particle theory , Plenum Press 1976 (Symposium at Bielefeld University)
• Editor: Statistical mechanics of quarks and hadrons , North Holland 1981 (Symposium at Bielefeld University 1980)
• Editor with Maurice Jacob: Quark matter formation and heavy ion collisions , World Scientific 1982 (Symposium at Bielefeld University)
• Editor with Sourav Sarkar and Bikash Sinha: The physics of the quark-gluon plasma , Springer Verlag 2010 (winter school in Jaipur, India)
• Extreme States of Matter in Strong Interaction Physics: An Introduction , Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg, 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-23907-6 .
• God's invisible cubes: Physics at the limits of what can be explored, CH Beck, 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-65549-4 .
• Ultimate Horizons: Probing the Limits of the Universe , Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg, 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-41656-9 .
• Cosmic twilight: the world before the Big Bang , CH Beck, 2016, ISBN 978-3-406-69787-6 .
• Before Time Began: The Big Bang and the Emerging Universe , Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0-19-879242-0 .

Web links

• Homepage in Bielefeld
• Frithjof Karsch, Helmut Satz Quark Matter and Supercomputers , Research at Bielefeld University 1999, PDF file, with a short biography
• Larry McLerran on Helmut Satz "Helmut Satz and the Theory of Strongly Interacting Matter at Very High Energy Density"
• Helmut Satz: The world before the Big Bang. About the Origin of the Universe , Bielefeld University, Center for Interdisciplinary Research, 2017-03.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Matsui, Sentence J / Suppression by quark gluon plasma formation ${\displaystyle \Psi }$ , Phys. Lett. B 178, 1986, p. 416
2. ^ Sentence Deconfinement and percolation , Nucl. Phys. A 642, 1998, p. 130
3. ↑ Castorina, Dmitri Kharzeev , Sentence Thermal Hadronization and Hawking-Unruh Radiation in QCD , Eur. Phys. J. C 52, 2007, p. 187