Minister’s Lifetime Achievement Award for our physicist prof. Krzysztof Redlich!
The Minister’s Lifetime Achievement Award is an individual award that enjoys great prestige in the community. It is a recognition of the laureate’s achievements, which have left a measurable and recognisable contribution to science. Prof. Krzysztof Redlich received the award at the Polish Science Gala in Toruń on 19 February. Our sincere congratulations!
– In my opinion, this is also an award for the University and Faculty, which have created conditions, atmosphere as well as a system of values and education that ennobles creative scientific research and scholars of the highest level – believes prof. dr hab. Krzysztof Redlich (Head of the Department of Particle Physics and Nuclear Astrophysics, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, University of Wrocław).
Prof. Krzysztof Redlich is a theoretical physicist dealing with the physics of elementary particles and heavy ion collisions working at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Wrocław.
He received the title of professor in 1995 and became a full professor at the University of Wrocław in 2000 and head of the Department of Particle Physics in 2017. He is a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, an active member of the PAU and the Academia Europea.
In 2023, he served as President of the Wrocław Branch of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His scientific activities to date have been recognised internationally: he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in 2001 and the Smoluchowski-Warburg Prize in 2013.
His achievements have also been recognised in Poland: in 1999 he received the Scientific Award of the Third Branch of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and twice the team prize of the Minister of Science: 2000, 2003. in 2007 he was nominated Professor Mercator by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany.
He received an honorary doctorate from the German University of Bielefeld for his research results on the thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas and the description of hadron production in heavy ion collision experiments.
His achievements are mainly in the two areas mentioned in the regulation of the Minister of Science and Higher Education: scientific and organisational.
Prof. Redlich has carried out scientific research, which has resulted in the acquisition of new knowledge in the discipline documented by the results in 284 scientific publications of which he is co-author. The papers concern the theoretical description and phenomenology of matter of strongly interacting particles, their importance is evidenced by the number of 13 844 citations and the author’s Hirsch index, h = 56. The total scientific output also includes publications related to the participation of Prof. Redlich in the ALICE experimental collaboration at CERN (within the Polish research group from the National Centre for Nuclear Research in Świerk near Warsaw).
Prof. Redlich’s total publication output counts 622 publications, cited 28,390 times with an index h = 88. It is worth mentioning here that according to the ‘AD Scientific Index’ ranking (https://www.adscientificindex.com/?country_code=pl ), Prof. Redlich is among the top ten best cited scientists in Poland.
The topics of prof. Redlich’s scientific work are related to the description of physical phenomena occurring in dense matter of strongly interacting particles. Such systems are the subject of intensive experimental research with ultra-relativistic collisions of heavy ions at the European CERN Laboratory in Geneva, at the BNL National Laboratory in Brookhaven and at the Institute for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt.
The fundamental aim of this research is to describe the properties of a new state of matter called quark-gluon plasma as predicted by the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics. Prof. Redlich’s publications concern both the theoretical approach to the study of collective and critical phenomena in the matter of strongly interacting particles, as well as the phenomenological description and interpretation of experimental data.
The papers co-authored by prof. Redlich have made important contributions to the development of the field internationally and have inspired the directions of experimental research on heavy ion collisions at CERN and BNL. In particular, prof. Redlich’s series of papers on charge fluctuations, strangeness production and charmonium regeneration as a result of hadronisation of quark-gluon plasmas inspired further theoretical research and experimental data analysis directions in the ALICE collaboration at CERN and the STAR collaboration at BNL. These were important for understanding hadron production.
Particularly well-known and novel results of prof. Redlich’s publications include:
1. Description of the statistical physics and kinetics of matter of strongly interacting particles taking into account intrinsic symmetries, including non-transverse symmetries and the introduction of the so-called projection method.
2. Introduction of the concept of hadron production freeze-out curve and formulation of the phenomenological condition for quark-gluon plasma freeze-out in heavy ion collisions, which allowed to predict the dependence of hadron multiplicity on collision energy.
3. Introduction of the canonical statistical model describing the production of strange particles and alluring hadrons in elementary and heavy ion collisions perfectly describing experimental results in a wide range of energies.
4. First descriptions of photon production in dense matter QCD in the framework of thermal field theory including perturbation series resummation.
5. Calculations of the equation of state and charge fluctuations in QCD matter on the basis of lattice field theory.
6. Derivation of theoretical methods allowing calculations of charge fluctuations in effective chiral models including renormalisation group equations.
Selected publications: • A. Andronic, P. Braun-Munzinger, K. Redlich, J. Stachel, Nature 561, no. 7723, 321 (2018), cite 499 • J. Cleymans and K. Redlich, Phys. Rev. C 60, 054908 (1999), cite 433 • J. Cleymans, H. Oeschler, K. Redlich and S. Wheaton, Phys. Rev. C 73, 034905 (2006), cite 664 • C.R. Allton, M. Doring, S. Ejiri, S.J. Hands, O. Kaczmarek, F. Karsch, E. Laermann, and K. Redlich, Phys. Rev. D 71 (2005) 054508, cite 546 • C. Sasaki, B. Friman and K. Redlich, Phys. Rev. D 75, 074013 (2007), cite 297 • P. Braun-Munzinger, K. Redlich and J. Stachel, in Elsevier monograph *Hwa, R.C. (ed.) et al.: Quark gluon plasma 3* 491-599 (2004), doi:10.1142/97898127955330008, cite 609
His organisational achievements and the expansion of international cooperation to improve the quality of research, in turn, are due to prof. Krzysztof Redlich’s contribution to the physics of dense matter of strongly interacting particles.
His high standing is confirmed by his participation in strategic international bodies shaping research directions in particle and heavy-ion physics in Europe. He was, among others, a member of the Science Policy Committee (SPC) at CERN (2013-18), a member of the GSI/FAIR Scientific Council (2011-2017). He was also a member of the Physics Preparatory Group of the European Strategy for Particle Physics (from 2019-2020). Thanks to his position, the Department of Particle Theory at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Wrocław has a leading role in research and the internationalisation of the staff. Prof. Redlich’s position is confirmed by his appointment to the first University Council of the University of Wrocław in 2019-20, and his election as President of the Wrocław Branch of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2023.
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Date of publication: 21.02.2025
Added by: M.J.
