_____ Piet Mulders _____
_____ Piet Mulders _____
Piet Mulders is professor of Theoretical Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Faculty of Sciences at the VU University in Amsterdam
He studied Theoretical physics in Nijmegen, where he obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Johan de Swart in 1980. After this he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and in the Center for Theoretical Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA). From 1984-1995 he worked as a staff member at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics (NIKHEF) in Amsterdam. Since 1995 he works as Full Professor at the VU University, being Chairman of the Department of Physics and Astronomy between 2002 and 2006.
His research interests focus on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong interactions which is part of the Standard Model of particle physics. In the field of hadron physics he made significant contributions to studies on multiquark hadrons, chiral quark models and Skyrme models as well as on the effect of the nuclear environment on hadron properties. In the field of high energy scattering processes he made a systematic study of the role of transverse momentum of the quarks and gluons in hadrons pointing out the way in which correlation between momenta and spins can be accessed in dedicated electroweak and hadronic scattering experiments. The studies show how the flow of color charge at the level of quarks and gluons leads to experimental signatures in analogy to the interference patterns caused by confined magnetic fields in the Aharonov-Bohm experiment.
Outreach
P.J. Mulders / mulders@few.vu.nl