Helen Caines
· Horace D. Taft (B.A. 1949) Professor of Physics / Director of Graduate StudiesYale University · Department of Physics
Active 1993–2025
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About
Helen Caines is a Professor of Physics and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Physics at Yale University. Her research concentrates on understanding the behavior of nuclear matter under extremes of temperature and density. She investigates the formation and properties of Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), a deconfined state of quarks and gluons that exists when energy densities exceed six times that of nuclear matter. Helen collaborates on the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven Laboratory and on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Her work involves measuring high momentum particles produced in heavy-ion collisions and studying their interactions with the QGP to gain insights into this new state of matter. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, earned in 1996, and has been recognized as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, UK. Her contributions to experimental nuclear physics and her focus on understanding the properties of nuclear matter under extreme conditions are central to her scientific endeavors.
Research topics
- Particle physics
- Physics
- Nuclear physics
- Quantum mechanics
- Statistics
- Atomic physics
- Computer Science
- Astronomy
- Geometry
- Mathematics
Selected publications
Nonmonotonic Energy Dependence of Net-Proton Number Fluctuations
Physical Review Letters · 2021 · 210 citations
Nonmonotonic variation with collision energy (sqrt[s_{NN}]) of the moments of the net-baryon number distribution in heavy-ion collisions, related to the correlation length and the susceptibilities of the system, is suggested as a signature for the quantum chromodynamics critical point. We report the first evidence of a nonmonotonic variation in the kurtosis times variance of the net-proton number (proxy for net-baryon number) distribution as a function of sqrt[s_{NN}] with 3.1 σ significance for…
Physical Review Letters · 2021 · 149 citations
The Breit-Wheeler process which produces matter and antimatter from photon collisions is experimentally investigated through the observation of 6085 exclusive electron-positron pairs in ultraperipheral Au+Au collisions at sqrt[s_{NN}]=200 GeV. The measurements reveal a large fourth-order angular modulation of cos4Δϕ=(16.8±2.5)% and smooth invariant mass distribution absent of vector mesons (ϕ, ω, and ρ) at the experimental limit of ≤0.2% of the observed yields. The differential cross section as…
Physical review. C · 2021 · 148 citations
We report a systematic measurement of cumulants, ${C}_{n}$, for net-proton, proton, and antiproton multiplicity distributions, and correlation functions, ${\ensuremath{\kappa}}_{n}$, for proton and antiproton multiplicity distributions up to the fourth order in $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions at $\sqrt{{s}_{NN}}=7.7$, 11.5, 14.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 54.4, 62.4, and 200 GeV. The ${C}_{n}$ and ${\ensuremath{\kappa}}_{n}$ are presented as a function of collision energy, centrality and kinematic acce…
Physical review. C · 2021 · 106 citations
Global hyperon polarization, ${\overline{P}}_{\mathrm{H}}$, in $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions over a large range of collision energy, $\sqrt{{s}_{\mathrm{NN}}}$, was recently measured and successfully reproduced by hydrodynamic and transport models with intense fluid vorticity of the quark-gluon plasma. While na\"{\i}ve extrapolation of data trends suggests a large ${\overline{P}}_{\mathrm{H}}$ as the collision energy is reduced, the behavior of ${\overline{P}}_{\mathrm{H}}$ at small $\sqr…
Physical review. C · 2023-07-27 · 34 citations
articleOpen accessIn relativistic heavy-ion collisions, a global spin polarization, ${P}_{\mathrm{H}}$, of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ and $\overline{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}}$ hyperons along the direction of the system angular momentum was discovered and measured across a broad range of collision energies and demonstrated a trend of increasing ${P}_{\mathrm{H}}$ with decreasing $\sqrt{{s}_{NN}}$. A splitting between $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ and $\overline{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}}$ polarizat…
Frequent coauthors
- 701 shared
Z. Tang
Brookhaven National Laboratory
- 680 shared
N. Xu
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- 644 shared
Y. G.
- 588 shared
B. Mohanty
National Institute of Science Education and Research
- 559 shared
V. Okorokov
- 534 shared
L. Kumar
- 527 shared
A. Kisiel
- 511 shared
A. Bhasin
Argonne National Laboratory
Awards & honors
- Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) (2019)
- APS CSWP Woman Physicist of the Month (Jan 2012)
- Elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics, UK (2008)
- Enseignant Invite (Invited Professor) Fellowship, Strasbourg…
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Advanced…
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