David Blaschke - Biography#

David Blaschke started his scientific career at Rostock University where he got acquainted with Greens function methods in thermodynamic equilibrium and nonequilibrium, applied to the physics of strong correlations in nonideal plasmas. His Diploma thesis was on a Path Integral approach to collective modes (plasmons) and bound states in strongly correlated Fermion systems. Under the supervision of his teacher, Gerd Roepke, the dissolution of bound states under the influence of compression and heating (Mott effect) came into the focus of his scientific research. His Ph.D. studies were partly performed at the JINR Dubna where he studied the quark model of hadrons and published in 1985 the idea to describe deconfinement of hadrons as a Mott effect, developed further in his PhD thesis (1987) on The role of Pauli blocking effects in the equation of state for strongly interacting matter.

After the PhD, David Blaschke worked on J/psi suppression in heavy-ion collisions. His idea to describe charmonium dissociation in hadronic matter by quark exchange led to a well-known paper and stimulated studies by other groups. During his postdoctoral fellowship at CERN (1991-92), he profited from contacts with John Ellis, Rolf Hagedorn, Joerg Huefner and Helmut Satz. He developed his studies of the QCD phase transition from a nonrelativistic Green function approach to a quantum field theoretical formulation as the basis for his habilitation (1995) on Quantum statistics for effective quark models of hadronic matter. During his assistant professorship on Particle and Astrophysics at Rostock University (1998-2004) he formed the major directions of his research: (i) signals of QCD phase transitions in heavy-ion collisions, (ii) quark matter in compact star interiors, and (iii) particle production in strong fields.

During 2001-07 he was vice director of the Bogoliubov Laboratory for Theoretical Physics at JINR Dubna. After appointments at University Bielefeld and GSI Darmstadt he won a permanent professorship at University of Wroclaw in 2006. His present research is on the Mott dissociation of nucleons in hot and dense matter which is of fundamental importance for the upcoming heavy-ion collision experiments CBM @ FAIR and NICA @ JINR as well as for deconfinement in compact stars and during supernova collapse.