Daniel Tapia Takaki

Daniel Tapia Takaki is a high-energy nuclear physicist and associate professor of physics at the University of Kansas. He has worked for the ALICE and CMS collaborations at CERN’s Larger Hadron Collider, studying strong gluon fluctuations in the proton and lead nuclei to understand Quantum Chromodynamics and to determine the initial state of ultra-relativistic protons and ions at high energies. For his research, he has utilized the strong electromagnetic fields produced in multiperipheral collisions instead of ordinary hadronic collisions.  

More recently, he has studied applications of quantum mechanics in collider physics, including quantum tomography, to measure quantum entanglement and other quantum mechanical effects which have the potential to falsify foundation postulates of quantum mechanics. As part of his IARI fellowship with the Spencer Museum, Tapia Takaki is working with mathematician Angieszka Międlar and artist Janet Biggs on a collaborative project that explores how methods in linear algebra, nuclear physics, and video installation might inform one another.

Dr. Tapia Takaki joined as an Honors Faculty Fellow in the Fall 2022 semester.