Berndt Mueller

Prof. Mueller's work focuses on nuclear matter at extreme energy density. Quantum chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of nuclear forces, predicts that nuclear matter dissolves into quarks and gluons, the elementary constituents of protons and neutrons, when a critical density or temperature is exceeded. He and his collaborators are theoretically studying the properties of this "quark-gluon plasma", its formation, and its detection in high-energy nuclear collisions. His other research interests include symmetry violating processes in the very early universe and the chaotic dynamics of elementary particle fields. Prof. Mueller is the coauthor of textbooks on the Physics of the Quark-Gluon Plasma, on Symmetry Principles in Quantum Mechanics, on Weak Interactions, and on Neural Networks.