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Pepperdine | Seaver College
Christopher Plumberg

Christopher Plumberg

Assistant Professor of Physics
Natural Science, Seaver College
RAC 143
310.506.4978
https://astrophysicist87.github.io/

Biography

Christopher Plumberg obtained his PhD in physics in 2016 from The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. He has held three postdoctoral research positions: at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities in Minneapolis, MN; at Lund University in Lund, Sweden; and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, IL.

Christopher’s research focuses on theoretical high-energy nuclear physics at extremely large temperatures and densities. He specializes in the use of high-performance computing and relativistic fluid dynamics to describe the behavior of nuclear collisions at (nearly) the speed of light. He has published research on the space-time evolution and charge diffusion processes in nuclear collisions, the consequences of causality violations in collision simulations, and the signatures of a critical point in nuclear matter. His work provides a deeper understanding of the forces which hold the atomic nucleus together.

Christopher is also deeply interested in Christian apologetics, the philosophy of physics and mathematics, and the ways in which science itself points to the existence of the Creator. He currently lives in Camarillo with his wife Allyson and their four children.

Education

  • PhD Physics, The Ohio State University, 2016

 

  • Giuliano Giacalone, Wenbin Zhao, Benjamin Bally, Shihang Shen, Thomas Duguet, Jean-Paul Ebran, Serdar Elhatisari, Mikael Frosini, Timo A. Lähde, Dean Lee, Bing-Nan Lu, Yuan-Zhuo Ma, Ulf-G. Meißner, Govert Nijs, Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler, Christopher Plumberg, Tomás R. Rodríguez, Robert Roth, Wilke van der Schee, Björn Schenke, Chun Shen, and Vittorio Somà, Anisotropic Flow in Fixed-Target Pb208+Ne20 Collisions as a Probe of Quark-Gluon Plasma, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{134}, 082301 (2025)

  • C. Plumberg, D. Almaalol, T. Dore, D. Mroczek, J. Salinas San Martin, W. M. Serenone, L. Spychalla, P. Carzon, M. D. Sievert, F. G. Gardim, and J. Noronha-Hostler, Conservation of B, S, and Q charges in relativistic viscous hydrodynamics solved with smoothed particle hydrodynamics, Phys. Rev. C \textbf{111}, 044905 (2025)

  • Giuliano Giacalone, Wenbin Zhao, Benjamin Bally, Shihang Shen, Thomas Duguet, Jean-Paul Ebran, Serdar Elhatisari, Mikael Frosini, Timo A. Lähde, Dean Lee, Bing-Nan Lu, Yuan-Zhuo Ma, Ulf-G. Meißner, Govert Nijs, Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler, Christopher Plumberg, Tomás R. Rodríguez, Robert Roth, Wilke van der Schee, Björn Schenke, Chun Shen, Vittorio Somà, Exploiting Ne20 Isotopes for Precision Characterizations of Collectivity in Small Systems, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{135}, 012302 (2025)

  • Owen Bradley and Christopher Plumberg, Exploring freeze-out and flow using exact solutions of conformal hydrodynamics, Phys. Rev. C \textbf{109}, 054913 (2024)

  • J. I. Kapusta, C. Plumberg and T. Welle, Embedding a critical point in a hadron to quark-gluon crossover equation of state, Phys. Rev. C 106, 014909 (2022). 
  • E. R. Most, S. P. Harris, C. Plumberg, M. G. Alford, J. Noronha, J. Noronha-Hostler, F. Pretorius, H. Witek and N. Yunes, Projecting the likely importance of weak-interaction-driven bulk viscosity in neutron star mergers, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc. 509, 1096-1108 (2021).
  • S. Pratt and C. Plumberg, Charge Balance Functions for Heavy-Ion Collisions at LHC Energies, Charge balance functions for heavy-ion collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, Phys. Rev. C 104, 014906 (2021). 
  • C. Plumberg, D. Almaalol, T. Dore, J. Noronha and J. Noronha-Hostler, Causality violations in realistic simulations of heavy-ion collisions, Phys. Rev. C 105, L061901 (2022). 
  • N. Summerfield, B. N. Lu, C. Plumberg, D. Lee, J. Noronha-Hostler and A. Timmins, 16O16O at RHIC and the LHC comparing α-clustering vs substructure, Phys. Rev. C 104, L041901 (2021). 
  • C. Plumberg, Hanbury-Brown--Twiss interferometry and collectivity in p+p, p+Pb, and Pb+Pb collisions, Phys. Rev. C 102, 054908 (2020). 
  • J. Adolfsson, et al., QCD Challenges from pp to A-A Collisions, Eur. Phys. J. A 56, 288 (2020).
  • M. Bluhm, et al., Dynamics of critical fluctuations: Theory - phenomenology - heavy-ion collisions, Nucl. Phys. A 1003, 122016 (2020).

Courses

  • Physics I
  • Physics II
  • Modern Physics
  • Research Methods