Unfortunately, gluons interact with quarks and with each other strongly and in a complicated way. My research focuses on developing an understanding of how quarks communicate with each other and what glue is. The possibility of finding this matter has generated much excitement in recent years, with several groups claiming experimental sitings. The concepts of energy, momentum, and angular momentum receive their deepest treatment here, and relativistic and quantum-mechanical calculations are still benchmarked against classical limits. Additionally, our intuitive familiarity with classical contexts allows the introduction of concepts such as tensors and generalized coordinate transformations without complicating matters with the intrinsic weirdness of quantum mechanics.
Classical mechanics provides the conceptual glue that connects all areas of physics.
My current research is focused on several problems that relate to gravitational wave production. One long-term project, which I am pursuing with John Blondin, is the numerical simulation of gravitational waves from Type II supernovae . There are several potential sources of gravitational waves from supernovae, but currently little is known about the frequency spectrum and amplitude of these waves. I am in the process of building a numerical code that will allow us to simulate the supernova core collapse and explosion, and the gravitational waves that result. Much of my previous research has addressed the thermodynamical properties of black holes.