Helen Caines

Helen Louise Caines is the Horace D. Taft Professor of Physics at Yale University and a member of the Yale Wright Laboratory. She is a nuclear physicist who studies the quark–gluon plasma (QGP) using heavy-ion collisions. She was the elected co-spokesperson of the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) from 2017 to 2023 and is also a collaborator on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider and the ePIC experiment at the future Electron-Ion Collider. She earned her PhD at Birmingham in 1996, with doctoral research conducted on the NA49 experiment at the CERN SPS, where she studied strangeness production in lead–lead collisions as a probe of quark–gluon plasma formation.

Career

After completing her doctorate, Caines joined Ohio State University as a postdoctoral researcher in 1996, working on the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She was elected a junior representative of the STAR collaboration in 1998.

Research The collision of two gold ions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Caines' research focuses on understanding the behaviour of nuclear matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density, using heavy-ion collisions to create and study the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), the state of matter believed to have existed microseconds after the Big Bang.

Her early work at RHIC contributed to establishing the properties of the QGP through measurements of hadronic particle production in the STAR detector. She has played a central role in the RHIC beam energy scan programme, studying Au+Au collisions at centre-of-mass energies from = 7.7 to 200 GeV to map the QCD phase diagram and search for the predicted critical point of the transition between hadronic matter and the QGP.

A widely noted result from Caines' group was the measurement of global hyperon polarization in heavy-ion collisions, which demonstrated that the QGP is the most vortical fluid ever observed. She has also been involved in the isobar collision programme, comparing ruthenium–ruthenium and zirconium–zirconium collisions to test for the chiral magnetic effect in QCD matter.

More recently, Caines has applied machine learning techniques to heavy-ion physics, including the use of artificial neural networks to identify quark and gluon jets in the dense environment of heavy-ion collisions.

Teaching and service Caines developed the course Being Human in STEM at Yale, which examines how socioeconomic background, gender, race, religion, and sexuality shape the experience of working in STEM. The course was modelled on a similar programme at Amherst College.

She has served on the American Physical Society's Committee on the Status of Women in Physics and the Committee on Minorities in Physics. 2024 – Appointed Horace D. Taft Professor of Physics