Prof. Tetyana Galatyuk graduated Nuclear Physics Department of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. She received her doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2009. In 2012 she was awarded a Helmholtz Young Investigator Group “Exploring Quark Matter with Virtual Photons”. She has held professorship at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at TU Darmstadt since 2021. Tetyana is internationally recognized as an expert in studying microscopic properties of QCD matter at high densities with heavy-ion collisions, study of electromagnetic structure of baryons with hadron beams, phenomenology of HIC and instrumentation. She is Group Leader “QCD Matter Research” in the department HADES at GSI and Professor of Experimental hadron- and nuclear physics at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Darmstadt (web-page of her reserach group “Investigating Quark Matter with Virtual Photons” at the TU Darmstadt).
In this interview (in German) given to the Helmholtz Research Academy Hesse for FAIR she shares some insights into her work:
I am a member of the HADES, CBM and STAR Collaboration, and we address the question: What does high-density, high-temperature nuclear matter look like and what can we learn about it? What happens when gold nuclei accelerated to about 90% of the speed of light collide with gold nuclei at rest? For an extremely short time, t~10^(-23) seconds, states of matter with extreme temperatures (>10^12 K) and densities (>280 Mt/cm^3) are created. The possibility of forming and investigating strongly interacting matter under such conditions in the laboratory is truly fascinating. However, the experiments should not be imagined as standing on a table and individual physicists working on them – they are house-sized detectors operated by international collaborations. We love real challenges, build innovative detectors and deal with the processing and analysis of large amounts of data. We are successful because we work together in a perfect team of experts from many fields. We learn to deal with the unknown and “never give up”.