Dr. Megan E. Connors

Associate Professor

so-spokesperson, sPHENIX

Email: mconnors@gsu.edu

      

My research uses jets to probe the quark gluon plasma (QGP). The QGP is a hot dense liquid of quarks and gluons, which existed immediately after the Big Bang and can be recreated in high-energy heavy ion collisions. Our group at GSU helped build the hadronic calorimeter for a new experiment called sPHENIX at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. To learn more about sPHENIX read: sPHENIX sPHENIX started with a Au+Au collisions during a commissioning run in 2023 and took a large p+p dataset in 2024. The 2025 RHIC Run will provide a high statistics Au+Au data set that will allow us to make high precision jet measurements to study energy loss in the QGP. After sPHENIX completes its physics goals, RHIC will be transformed into an Electron Ion Collider. We are members of the ePIC collaboration which will use the sPHENIX hadronic calorimeter as the barrel HCal and similar technology for the forward HCal which we will also contribute to developing.