Tom Reichert, postdoc at FIAS for the past two years, will be conducting research at Berkeley in the future. A Branco Weiss Fellowship will fund his research with CHF 600,000 over five years. Starting in January 2026 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California (USA), Reichert will work with Volker Koch to investigate the formation of the fastest rotating vortices of quarks and gluons, which are created in collisions of atomic nuclei and polarize matter.

Reichert completed his doctorate at Goethe University in June 2023 under the supervision of Marcus Bleicher. In his subsequent postdoc at FIAS in collaboration with FIAS Fellow Jan Steinheimer-Froschauer, his research focused on combining heavy ion research with neutron star observations to discover the critical point of quantum chromo-dynamics.

Reichert received the FAIR-GSI PhD Award 2024 earlier this year. In his doctoral thesis, he investigated the collisions of heavy atomic nuclei at different energies. He used and developed theoretical transport simulations to understand matter under these extreme conditions. Before this, Reichert will be working for five months as a Fulbright scholar on a research project with Steffen Bass at Duke University.

In the project "Subatomic Swirls, Polarization and Hydrodynamics at the Femtoscopic Scale" in Berkeley, he will develop a new model to understand the formation of femtoscopic swirls in quark-gluon plasma and polarized matter. With his new hydrodynamic multi-fluid model with a continuous freeze-out process, he is taking heavy ion physics in a new direction.

The fellowship of the late Swiss entrepreneur Dr. Branco Weiss is aimed at postdocs who are considered “rising stars” in their field and who also develop a vision for the future reshaping of their scientific field.