General Lab Information

Zhoudunming (Kong) Tu

Associate Scientist, EIC Group, Physics Department

Zhoudunming (Kong) Tu

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Physics Department
Bldg. 510A, Room 1-181
P.O. Box 5000
Upton, NY 11973-5000

(631) 344-6139
zhoudunming@bnl.gov

Pronouns: He/Him/His

My name is Kong, and I am an experimental nuclear and particle physicist primarily working on the EPIC experiment at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) and the STAR experiment at RHIC, both at Brookhaven National Laboratory. My research centers on color confinement — one of QCD's deepest open questions, and a Millennium Prize Problem. While we know quarks and gluons are permanently confined inside hadrons, we don't yet understand how confinement manifests in QCD's fundamental phenomena. I study this using cutting-edge experiments at RHIC and the EIC.

I'm also a strong believer in advancing science through education. As a national lab scientist, I feel just as responsible for training the next generation as university faculty are, and I work to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive research group — welcoming students of all backgrounds, domestic and international. I'm also a mentor in DOE's SULI Summer program at Brookhaven.

Personally, I love to travel and see the world, and my hobbies include surfing, climbing, skiing, sailing, and campervan building. I learn science through my hobbies, and I learn my hobbies through science. Ask me how sailing or surfing or highway traffic help me think of problems in high energy physics! Nature is fun.

Research | Education | Appointments | Publications | Highlights | Awards | Video

Research Activities

My research sits at the intersection of high-energy heavy-ion (HI) physics and cold QCD — probed via both proton-proton (pp) collisions and deep inelastic scattering (DIS) — as complementary windows onto how matter emerges from QCD. HI collisions recreate the hot, deconfined quark-gluon plasma believed to have filled the early universe microseconds after the Big Bang, probing bulk QCD matter under extreme temperature and density. Cold QCD, via pp and DIS, instead probes the internal structure and dynamics of individual hadrons and partons — spin, mass, confinement, and gluon content — without the complication of a thermal medium. Together, hot and cold QCD offer two windows onto the same underlying question: how quarks and gluons, permanently confined by the strong force, give rise to the visible matter in our universe.

Experiments that my group are involving:

Education

  • M.S & Ph.D in high energy nuclear physics, Rice University, Houston TX  2018
  • B.S. in Physics & Mathematics, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS, 2013

Professional Appointments

  • 2025 - present: Associate Adjunct Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University
  • 2024 - present: Associate Physicist, Brookhaven National Lab
  • 2021 - 2024: Assistant Physicist, Brookhaven National Lab
  • 2018 - 2021: Goldhaber Fellow, Brookhaven National Lab
  • 2013 - 2018: Research Assistant, Rice University,

Community contribution and outreach:

  • Peer-reviewed journal referee in Phys. Rev. Lett., Phys. Rev. C, Eur. Phys. J. C, etc.
  • Grant reviewer for the National Science Center of Poland, US Department of Energy, etc.
  • Mentor in DOE SULI program.

Selected Publications

  • Aboona BE, Adam J, et al (2026) Measuring spin correlation between quarks during QCD confinement. Nature 650:65–71. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09920-0
  • Datta J, Deshpande A, Kharzeev DE, et al (2025) Entanglement as a Probe of Hadronization. Physical Review Letters 134: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.134.111902
  • Hentschinski M, Kharzeev DE, Kutak K, Tu Z (2024) QCD evolution of entanglement entropy. Reports on Progress in Physics 87:120501. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/ad910b
  • Abdulhamid MI, Aboona BE, Adam J, et al (2024) Observation of Strong Nuclear Suppression in Exclusive J/ψ Photoproduction in Au+Au Ultraperipheral Collisions at RHIC. Physical Review Letters 133:. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.133.052301
  • Hentschinski M, Kharzeev DE, Kutak K, Tu Z (2023) Probing the Onset of Maximal Entanglement inside the Proton in Diffractive Deep Inelastic Scattering. Physical Review Letters 131:. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.131.241901
  • Abdallah MS, Aboona BE, Adam J, et al (2022) Probing the Gluonic Structure of the Deuteron with J/ψ Photoproduction in d+Au Ultraperipheral Collisions. Physical Review Letters 128:. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.128.122303
  • Andreev V, Baghdasaryan A, Baty A, Begzsuren K, Belousov A, et al. (2021) Measurement of charged particle multiplicity distributions in DIS at HERA and its implication to entanglement entropy of partons. The European Physical Journal C. doi: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-08896-1
  • Tu Z, Kharzeev DE, Ullrich T (2020) Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox and Quantum Entanglement at Subnucleonic Scales. Physical Review Letters. doi: 10.1103/physrevlett.124.062001
  • Khachatryan V, Sirunyan AM, Tumasyan A, Adam W, Asilar E, et al. (2017) Observation of Charge-Dependent Azimuthal Correlations in p−Pb Collisions and Its Implication for the Search for the Chiral Magnetic Effect. Physical Review Letters. doi: 10.1103/physrevlett.118.122301

Research Highlights

2025-2026

Spin correlations of Lambdas

In a 2026 Nature paper ("Measuring spin correlation between quarks during QCD confinement," Nature 650, 65), the STAR Collaboration at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider reported the first evidence that quantum spin correlations between a quark and its antiquark partner can survive hadronization — the violent process by which quarks, never seen in isolation, bind into ordinary particles. By studying pairs of Λ and Λ¯ particles produced together in proton-proton collisions, the team found their spins remained correlated at about 18%, far above what pure hadronization would predict. The result shows that quantum entanglement, born in the fleeting instant a quark-antiquark pair is created, can persist all the way through to the particles we detect — a new window onto how the quantum world of quarks connects to the everyday world of matter.

2022
Gluonic Structure of the deuteron

In a measurement published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 122303, the STAR Collaboration has reported a result on colliding high-energy photons with gluons inside the deuteron. It has provided a first glimpse of the gluonic structure of the simplest atomic nucleus. 

2020
Quantum entanglement

EPR paradox and quantum entanglement in particle physics. For the first time, we have observed an experimental hint of quantum entanglement of partons inside of proton. From a naive parton model, the probed region and the proton remnant is expected to be casually disconnected, very similar to the idea given by Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen in 1935, famously known as "EPR" paradox. However, the color confinement, one of the most outstanding problem in modern physics, tells us the quarks and gluons are entangled inside the proton. This "apparent" paradox could be resolved by what we have observed in terms of entanglement. In addition, the use of entanglement entropy in this work can be important for understanding the non-perturbative QCD of the hadron structure.

2017-2018
Chiral Magnetic Effect

It was predicted that the Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME) might exist in heavy ion collisions at high energy. The implication for discovery of such an effect is huge, e.g., the non-trivial topological charge fluctuations in the vacuum, quark deconfinement, chiral symmetry restoration, the largest magnetic field trapped in the hot Quark-Gluon-Plasma. Proving any of this will be a major discovery by heavy ion experiments. At the beginning, the STAR experiment thought they have discovered this effect, where none of the background that people had thought about can reproduce the experimental data. Not until 2016-2017, our results from the CMS experiment at the LHC using a novel idea of proton-lead (pA) collision showed something totally unexpected from the picture of the CME. The result has unambiguously shown that the background contribution to this effect is dominant, and it's far from discovery of the CME. Later, we have set the upper limit for CME at LHC energies, which is still the most precise measurement to-date. The impact of the study has provided guidances and ideas to the search for CME at RHIC, especially the Isobar experiments. 

Awards & Recognition

  • ElCUG award for early career scientist (lab equivalent position), 2024.
  • Award for exchange visits, Inter-American Network of Networks of QCD challenges, 2022.
  • Laboratory Directed Research and Developement (LDRD) Award (with $400,000 funding), Brookhaven National Lab, 2022-2024
  • Goldhaber Distinguished Fellowship, Brookhaven National Lab, 2018
  • Henry F. and Margaret Dunlap Fellowship, Rice University, 2017
  • Young Scientist Award with Best Experimental presentation at Quark Matter Conference, Nuclear Physics A, 2017

Featured Video

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Zhoudunming (Kong) Tu

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Physics Department
Bldg. 510A, Room 1-181
P.O. Box 5000
Upton, NY 11973-5000

(631) 344-6139
zhoudunming@bnl.gov