Professor Kim will be hosted by the Lattice group and working with Profs Aarts, Allton and Hands.
Professor Kim has been a long-time collaborator of Prof Hands (since 1995) and of Profs Aarts and Allton (since 2004). Their common work has focussed on the behaviour of quarks and gluons in the quark-gluon plasma, both at high temperature and at nonzero quark density. The quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter consisting of liberated quarks and gluons which was prevalent in the early Universe, is currently being recreated at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. One highlight, published in 2007, concerned the calculation of the electrical conductivity, a hydrodynamic transport coefficient, using numerical simulations of lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).
Last year, Profs Aarts and Kim, together with collaborators in Italy, Ireland and the USA, published a study of heavy quarks in the quark-gluon plasma using non-relativistic QCD. With Prof Allton, they are currently completing a longer publication on this topic. Profs Kim and Hands are also continuing their study of the phase structure of a non-abelian gauge theory, QCD with two colours rather than three, at low temperature but at very high particle density, such as found in a nucleus or a neutron star.
Prof Kim has spent time in Swansea before on two occasions. During the academic year 2004-2005, he spent a sabbatical at Swansea University, funded by PPARC. During July 2007, Prof Kim spent one month in Swansea, partly funded by the Royal Society. His current visit is funded by STFC.