Dean Betts Co-Chairs 2017 Quark Matter Conference

The 26th international Quark Matter Conference will be held in Chicago from Sunday, February 5 through Saturday, February 11. Russell Betts, dean of the College of Science, is co-chair of the local organizing committee, along with colleagues from University of Illinois at Chicago, The Ohio State University, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The conference, which most recently has taken place in Kobe, Japan; Darmstadt, Germany; and Washington D.C., is one of the major conferences in the field. It aims to bring together theoretical and experimental physicists from around the world to discuss developments in high energy heavy ion physics. This year’s discussions will provide attendees with a fundamental understanding of ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collision experiments conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Theory Ion Collider and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. In addition to the scientific program, a public lecture entitled, “From Quarks to Cosmos” will be presented by University of Chicago faculty member Rocky Kolb on Thursday, February 9. Approximately 800 attendees are expected at this year’s conference.