Wit Busza

Biography

Professor Wit Busza received the B.Sc. (1960) and Ph.D. (1964) from University College London and joined MIT in 1969, becoming a full Professor in 1979. In 1990, he was awarded the Buechner Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Education Program in the Department of Physics, in 1993 the School of Science Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and in 2012 the Buechner Faculty Award for Undergraduate advising. In 1995, Professor Busza was appointed a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow and in 2015 he was honored with a Special Issue of Annals of Physics. From 1991-2011 he was the leader of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Group at MIT. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Research Interest

"Professor Busza’s prime research focus is the study of matter at extremes of temperature and energy density through the study of pp, pA and AA collisions at high energies, and the understanding of the mechanism of multiparticle production in such collisions. Shortly after the big bang, our universe consisted of a sort of a homogeneous soup of point like particles. The hadronic part of this soup was a dense collection of quarks and gluons. Matter was in a phase called a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). This soup expanded and cooled. At about ten microseconds, when the visible universe was about the size of the solar system, it went through a transition (probably a cross-over phase transition). The quarks and gluons coalesced into globules of hadronic matter. For the first time hadrons (e. g. protons, neutrons, pions etc.) are formed. By accelerating nuclei to ultra relativistic velocities and colliding them, we are trying to recreate and study in the laboratory, on a small scale, this transition and the state of matter produced immediately after the transition. This is the focus of Busza’s research.