Professor Soren Sorensen became official head of the physics department on October 31, 2000. Here is his first letter for Cross Sections. One of the great aspects of this newsletter is that it reaches many readers who at one point had their professional home here in our department, but now are out in "real" life outside the protective walls of our beloved UT. Many of you had even left our department before I arrived here in December 1984. Therefore I have found it appropriate to introduce myself to all of you who might not have had a chance to meet me. I will then promise you that in the future these "words from the head" will focus on the department and its members and not me. I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark, and got my education as a nuclear physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute. Not only did I learn a lot of interesting nuclear physics from people like Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, Carl Gaarde and Ole Hansen, I also started to realize what a first class physics department is all about: great science has to be the driver. (The only problem is to figure out what great science really is! If you know, please tell me.) My Ph.D. thesis about heavy ion induced transfer reactions was based on experiments done at Berkeley together with Frank Plasil's group from ORNL. So when I became a post-doc in Copenhagen I was happy to accept an invitation from Frank in 1982 to spend a year in Oak Ridge working on the new Holifield Tandem Accelerator Facility. That year was a turning point in my life. I loved the scientific environment in Oak Ridge and the great group of physicists I worked with: Frank Plasil, Glenn Young, Terry Awes, Felix Obenshain and many others. Shortly after I returned to Denmark I learned from Lee Riedinger that UT's Department of Physics had a position open in nuclear physics and I did not hesitate to apply. I still vividly remember my job interview in 1984. I had bought a coat and a tie for the occasion and I was very uncomfortable, but everybody was very, very nice to me and made me feel at home. Bill Bugg made a great impression on me with his direct but informal questions, as well as with his office, where I wondered how the tables could carry the weight of all the papers stacked on them. However, the conversation I remember the best was with Alvin Nielsen. I was very, very surprised when, in a small office deep in the dungeons of the physics building, I meet a kind, older man who spoke to me in fluent Danish. That was really the last thing I had expected here in East Tennessee. Alvin and I had a great talk. He obviously knew more about Kierkegaard and music than I did, so I tried to turn the discussion to issues like contemporary Danish politics where I felt more at home. Had I known then that one day I would follow in his footsteps as head of the department, I would have spent much more time on that occasion, and the following years when he was still active in physics, to learn about the intricacies of leading an academic department. By all accounts, Alvin was a real champ at that. I managed to get the job after the first choice opted to take a position in Denver because he was into mountaineering and the mountains in Colorado were a bit more challenging than the Smokies. In the beginning Mike Guidry and I worked a lot together on experiments on nucleon transfer to deformed nuclei, but after some time I got interested in a new field on the boundary between nuclear and high energy physics: ultrarelativistic heavy ion physics and the study of hot and dense nuclear matter. The great goal within this field is to create and subsequently study the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), which is a deconfined "soup" of quarks and gluons. In the first 10 microseconds after the Big Bang all the material of the universe was in this phase, so the study of the QGP might even have interesting cosmological consequences. Ken Read and I work together with Glenn Young's group at ORNL on the PHENIX experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where we hope to create the plasma in collisions between lead ions at the new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. We started taking data this summer after 9-10 years of planning, design and construction. And who knows, maybe we have the effects of the plasma stored somewhere on our data tapes. We will hopefully know within the next one-to-two years. So what does all this have to do with being the head of the department? Nothing much directly. But somehow I feel that the better we all know each other, the better we can work together. So now I am looking forward to getting to know all of you, not just the many people in the department right now, since I know most of them. No, I am thinking about our many alumni who hopefully are using this newsletter as a tool to keep up with what happens in our department. I would be delighted if some of you would write me a letter, send me an e-mail (sorensen@utk.edu) or call me (865-974-7805) and tell me about your career after UT and what you feel the University and the physics department have meant to you. Compared to many other physics departments we have probably not done a super job of keeping track of our alumni and following them through their careers, so I hope you will take me up on my invitation and contact us. Cross Sections, Fall 2000 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on January 5, 2001. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu.