Atomic nucleus is the core of atom and contains more than 99% of the total mass. It is a quantum many body system at macroscopic level. Over 100 years, people have drawn an enriched picture of the nuclei and developed very sophisticated experimental methods that are not only used to explore nuclear physics, but also widely applied in various fields like human health and safety. Yet more and more discoveries are reported and keep nuclear physics as an extremely important frontier in nature science until now. The research of nuclear physics focuses on the fundamental structure and properties of nucleons, nuclei and nuclear matter, as well as the development and application of new detection techniques.
Nuclear researches in the Department of Physics, Tsinghua University dated back to 1930s when it became one of the key institutions of nuclear science in China. Upon the dawn of the new century, nuclear physics in the department has seen great achievements in both education and scientific research. The current team of 7 faculty members, 4 full professors and 3 associate professors, have received high reputation internationally with their contributions in the fields of hadron physics, nuclear reactions and equation of state at intermediate energies and relativistic heavy ion collisions and QGP studies.
Currently theoretical nuclear research in our department covers a variety of topics from nuclear structure at low energy to the heavy ion collisions at relativistic energy regime. We study the existence of the exotic states of hadrons. We developed a method to simultaneously extract scattering length and spacetime size from the correlation function of final-state particles in nuclear collision experiments. Using the independently developed Compact Spectrometer for Heavy Ion Experiments (CSHINE), we achieved the first measurement of the nn correlation function in a neutron-rich heavy system and extracted the nn interaction parameters from it. Using the independently developed CsI array, we measured the bremsstrahlung photon spectrum from nuclear collision reactions, thereby achieving the first precise measurement of the short-range correlation fraction in symmetric heavy-ion collisions with neutron-rich nuclei. In addition, we actively participated in physics pre-research and instrument development based on major national scientific facilities, and took part in experiments related to the CEE detector.
We are also deeply involved in and promote international cooperation, leading several key physics analyses in the XENONnT experiment and publishing significant physics results in top international journals, while being responsible for the development and fabrication of part of the detectors for the new large-scale scientific facility SoLID. We also actively participated in the physics pre-research for the newly approved Electron-Ion Collider (eRHIC) project in the United States and undertook multiple detector development tasks.
