Rate My Professor Rene Bellwied

Dr. Bellwied is an experimental nuclear physicist specializing in relativistic heavy ion physics. His research focuses on measuring and understanding the formation of visible matter during the early evolution of the Universe, particularly the phase transition from Quark-Gluon Plasma to hadrons such as pions, protons, and neutrons. His group studies heavy ion collisions at near light speed to recreate conditions microseconds after the Big Bang, analyzing strange exotic particles, heavy flavor production, collective flow phenomena, quantum entanglement from initial to final states, and connections to neutron star mergers. He is a founding member of the STAR experiment at RHIC, where the Quark-Gluon Plasma was discovered in 2005, and a member of the ALICE experiment at LHC and ePIC. In 2025, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for contributions to the ALICE collaboration studying quark-gluon plasma and exotic matter states. Key publications include 'Beam energy dependence of net-Lambda fluctuations measured by the STAR experiment at RHIC' (2020), 'Off-diagonal correlators of conserved charges from lattice QCD' (2020), 'Freeze-out temperature from net-kaon fluctuations at RHIC' (2019), 'Quantum entanglement in relativistic heavy ion collisions' (2018), 'Multiplicity-dependent enhancement of strange hadron production in proton-proton collisions' (2017), 'The QCD Phase Diagram from analytical continuation' (2015), and 'Is there a flavor hierarchy in the deconfinement transition of QCD?' (2013).