Wang won the 2024 Humboldt Research Award for his research in theoretical high-energy nuclear physics to explore a new state of matter in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Lab, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. With his colleagues he has pioneered the study of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) properties using energetic particles referred to as “jets,” which are produced together with QGP in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. QGP is a state of matter that is believed to have existed in the early universe only a few microseconds after the Big Bang and is thought to currently exist at the core of some of our Universe’s compact stellar objects such as neutron stars.

His recent work focuses on developing a technique called jet tomography, which uses jets and the supersonic sound waves they generate to shed light on the thermodynamic and transport properties of QGP.

(Photo: Central China Normal University)