UH Relativistic Heavy Ion Group 

Welcome to the Relativistic Heavy Ion group web-site at the University of Houston. 

Our group presently consists of three professors, three postdoctoral fellow and ten graduate students. The group members are:

• Rene Bellwied (Professor)

• Lawrence Pinsky (Professor)

• Anthony Timmins (Associate Professor)

• Wenqing Fan (Assistant Professor)

• Barak Schmookler (Postdoctoral fellow)

• Omar Vazquez Rueda (Postdoctoral fellow)

• Fabio Catalano (Postdoctoral fellow)

• Ibrahim Abualrob (Ph.D. student)

• Adel Bensaoula (Ph.D. student)

• Caleb Broodo (Ph.D. student)

• Maria Fernanda Torres Cabrera (Ph.D. student)

• Justin Chan (Ph.D. student)

• Aranya Giri (Ph.D. student)

• Sabrina Hernandez (Ph.D. student)

• Iris Likmeta (Ph.D. student)

• Rutik Manikandhan (Ph.D. student)

• Adisa Wobogo (Ph.D. student) 

Our group is involved in two large scale international experiments, the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island and the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Our group is trying to unfold the evolution of the universe in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, when matter was in a state that we try to re-create by colliding heavy ions at close to the speed of light.  A short video that tries to explain how RHIC works has recently been broadcast on the Science Channel.

An introduction into the relation between the Big Bang and our 'Mini-Bang' research can also be found in one of our presentations aimed at explaining some of the details of our research to potential new Ph.D. candidates (The Big Bang in the laboratory)

We are now more than twenty years into our program at RHIC and have discovered this exciting new state of matter, commonly labeled the 'Quark Soup'. As of 2008, our group has joined the ALICE experiment at the LHC. ALICE is the only dedicated heavy ion experiment at the LHC, but over the past ten years both CMS and ATLAS have also decided to participate in the one month of heavy ion running per year. So all three experiments have produced exciting heavy ion results. Here are some more historic introductory talks into our field,

The Liquid Universe - How RHIC illuminates the creation of matter

Heavy Ions at RHIC and LHC - Mapping the microcosm to the macrocosm

The Little Bang Evolution - From RHIC to LHC 

To show you the scope of the ALICE experiment please watch this clip. ALICE also produced a nice 'fly over' video using a drone camera, which gives you a good impression of the detector. Check it out here.

We also made it to Hollywood. The LHC was prominently featured in the first few minutes of the movie 'Angels and Demons'. Here is a short clip (avi-format,16:9) with kind permission from Sony studios.

You can also watch a short movie that accompanied the publication of one of our results in Nature: The precision measurement of the mass to charge ratio of particles and anti-particles.

This ALICE Nature publication was in part analyzed in our group. It detailed the strangeness production in small systems

We were also involved in the upgrade of the main ALICE detector, the Time Projection Chamber, which was completed in August 2020. Here is a nice article with an impressive video that summarizes the work on the upgrade installation: The ALICE TPC is upgraded

Prof. Bellwied was asked in 2020 to write a comprehensive (4-page) overview article on our findings at RHIC and LHC for the Innovation News Network. Here is a dedicated link to his article plus the full September 2020 Innovation Platform Issue containing additional interesting articles in nuclear, particle and astrophysics on the first 120 pages. A similar article was published in Scientia in August 2021.

Finally, in April 2025, all four ongoing LHC experiments were awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Of the more than 13,000 scientists that shared the prize, 31 were members of our group between 2015 and 2024. Here is a detailed UH article with all their names and the press release from CERN.

Special research interests in our group include particle identified multiplicity fluctuation, exotica production, and anisotropic flow measurements. We hope to unravel the creation of mass from the new deconfined phase of matter and the generation of long range structures in the early universe using these measurements. If you want to learn more about our research, click on any of the links on this page or get in touch with us. (Phone:713-743-3548, e-mail: bellwied@uh.edu).