Berndt Mueller, J. B. Duke Professor  

Berndt Mueller

Office Location: 250 Physics
Office Phone: (919) 660-2570
Email Address: muller@phy.duke.edu
Web Page: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~muller/

Specialties:
Theoretical nuclear physics

Education:
Dr. phil. nat., J.W. Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, 1973
Dipl. phys., J.W. Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, 1972

Research Categories: Theoretical Nuclear and Particle Physics

Research Description: Prof. Mueller's work focuses on nuclear matter at extreme energy density. Quantum chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of nuclear forces, predicts that nuclear matter dissolves into quarks and gluons, the elementary constituents of protons and neutrons, when a critical density or temperature is exceeded. He and his collaborators are theoretically studying the properties of this "quark-gluon plasma", its formation, and its detection in high-energy nuclear collisions. His other research interests include symmetry violating processes in the very early universe and the chaotic dynamics of elementary particle fields. Prof. Mueller is the coauthor of textbooks on the Physics of the Quark-Gluon Plasma, on Symmetry Principles in Quantum Mechanics, on Weak Interactions, and on Neural Networks.

Teaching (Fall 2009):

  • Physics 62l9r.04, Intro electric, magnet, optics
    Physics 150, M 03:30 PM-05:30 PM

Recent Publications   (More Publications)   (search)

  1. Fries, R.J., Kunihiro, T., Müller, B., Ohnishi, A. and Schäfer, A, From 0 to 5000 in 2 x 10**-24 seconds: Entropy production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, Nucl. Phys. A, vol. 830 (2009), pp. 519-522 [041]  [abs].
  2. Stave, S., Ahmed, M.W., France, R., Henshaw, S.S., Müller, B. and Weller, H. R., Finally understanding the 11B(p,α)αα reaction at very low energies, Phys. Rev. Lett. (Submitted, 2009) .
  3. Kunihiro, T., Müller, B., Ohnishi, A., and Schäfer, A., Towards a theory of entropy production in the little and big bang, Prog. Theor. Phys., vol. 121 (2009), pp. 555-575 [555]  [abs].
  4. Fries, R.J., Müller, B. and Schäfer, A, Decoherence and entropy production in relativistic nuclear collisions, Phys. Rev. C, vol. 79 (2009), pp. 034904 [PhysRevC.79.034904]  [abs].
  5. Tsai, H.-M. and Müller, B., Phenomenology of the three-flavour PNJL model and thermal strange quark production, J. Phys. G, vol. 36 (2009), pp. 075101 [2216]  [abs].

Curriculum Vitae

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

Postdocs Mentored

  • Young-ho Song (September 01, 2008 - present)  
  • Abhijit Majumder (November 1, 2005 - August 31, 2008)  
  • Jörg Ruppert (2004/10-2006/08)  
  • Thorsten Renk (2004/01-2005/08)  
  • Rainer J. Fries (2002/01-2003/08)  
  • Steffen A. Bass (1999/01-2000/08)  
  • Dirk H. Rischke (1996/09-1997/08)  
  • Carsten Greiner (1994/01-1996/12)  
  • Sen-Ben Liao (1992/09-1995/08)  
  • Xin-Nian Wang (1991/09-1992/08)  
  • Klaus Kinder-Geiger (1990/01-1991/08)  
  • Alec J. Schramm (1990/01-1992/08)