Bio
John Lajoie is the Group Leader for the Relativistic Nuclear Physics Group within the Physics Division. His research seeks to understand the structure of matter at a fundamental level, delving into the structure of protons and neutrons in terms of their constituents, quarks and gluons. He is currently a member of the sPHENIX Collaboration and the Spokesperson for the ePIC Collaboration. The ePIC detector will be the first detector at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a new nuclear physics facility being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory. ePIC and the EIC will answer fundamental questions about strongly interacting matter:
- How are quarks and gluons and their spins distributed in space and momentum inside the nucleon? How do the nucleon properties emerge from quark and gluon interactions?
- How do colour-charged quarks and gluons and colourless jets, interact with a nuclear medium? How do confined hadronic states emerge from quarks and gluons? How do quark–gluon interactions create nuclear binding?
- How does a dense nuclear environment affect quarks and gluons, their correlations, and their interactions? What happens to the gluon density in nuclei: does it saturate at high energy, giving rise to gluonic matter with universal properties in all nuclei, even the proton?
John came to ORNL from Iowa State University, where he was the Harmon-Ye Professor of Physics and taught and did research at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider for more than 26 years. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.