Ralf Rapp

Prof. Ralf Rapp received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Bonn (Germany); he did a postdoc at SUNY Stony Brook (1996-1999), held research assistant professor positions in Stony Brook (2001-2002) and at NORDITA (Copenhagen, 2002-2003), joined Texas A&M as assistant professor (2003), and subsequently became associate (2006) and full professor (2010). Prof. Rapp and his group conduct theoretical studies of spectral and transport properties of hadrons in hadronic matter and quarks in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), their relations to QCD phase transitions and observable signatures in heavy-ion collisions. They are also interested in color-superconducting cold dense quark matter and associated signatures in observables from compact ("neutron") stars, including mechanisms for gamma ray bursters.

Research Team

• Biaogang Wu
• Zhanduo Tang
• Nathan P. M. Holt
• Kaiyu Fu
• Thomas Hardin
• Tharun Krishna
• Tristin Skinner

Institutional Partnerships

• Cyclotron Institute
• Nuclear Solutions Institute
• HEFTY Collaboration

News Highlights

• DOE Topical Collaboration on Nuclear Theory HEFTY has been funded 
• Our B_c transport paper in Phys. Rev. C has been featured as an "Editors Suggestion" and a DOE web highlight
• Thomas Onyango completed his PhD degree (2024); thesis title: "Nucleon-Nucleon Bremsstrahlung from Coarse-Grained Transport Simulations of Heavy-Ion Collisions at Fermi Energies"
• Isaac Sarver completed his PhD degree (2023); thesis title: "Momentum Dependence of Quarkonia Spectral Function in Quark-Gluon Plasma"
• Joseph Atchison has completed his PhD degree (2021); thesis title: "The Electric Conductivity of Hot Pion Matter"
• Xiaojian Du has completed his PhD degree (2019); thesis title: "Quarkonium Transport Theory in Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions"
• Shuai Liu has completed his PhD degree (2018); thesis title: "A Unified T-Matrix Approach to Quark-Gluon Plasma"
• Nathan Holt has completed his PhD degree (2016); thesis title: "Sum Rules and Thermal Photon Emission in Hadronic Matter".