Barbara V. Jacak

Jacak works to probe high-energy-density matter and the quark-gluon plasma through ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions. Her efforts led to the discoveries of a dense partonic medium in collisions within RHIC's PHENIX collaboration; of jet quenching in Au+Au and its absence in d+Au; of enhanced baryon production, even inside hadronic jets; and of medium influences on leptonic properties. She forged the collaboration at the Bevalac Plastic Ball detector that discovered collective explosion with common flow of composite nuclei and light particles. With the CERN HELIOS experiment, she helped solve the anomalous lepton pair mystery by measuring branching ratios of Dalitz decays of eta and omega mesons. She was a leader of the CERN NA44 experiment effort that showed Bose-Einstein correlations exhibit momentum dependence.