Rafelski studied physics at
Goethe University Frankfurt in
Germany, where he received his
PhD in the spring of 1973 working with
Walter Greiner on strong fields and muonic atom tests of QED. In 1973, he began a series of
postdoctoral fellowships: first at the
University of Pennsylvania (
Philadelphia) with
Abraham Klein, then at the
Argonne National Laboratory near
Chicago where he worked with
John W. Clark of
Washington University in St. Louis and Michael Danos of National Bureau of Standards (now
NIST). In the spring of 1977, Rafelski moved for a few months to work at the
GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany, then continued on to a fellowship at CERN where he worked with
Rolf Hagedorn and
John S. Bell; Rafelski remains associated with CERN to this day. In the fall of 1979, Rafelski was appointed tenured associate professor at Goethe University Frankfurt where he taught for 4 years, while collaborating closely with Hagedorn,
Berndt Müller and
Gerhard Soff, whom Rafelski mentored in his PhD work. Rafelski then accepted the chair of Theoretical Physics at the
University of Cape Town (South Africa) where he created a Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics Institute before moving to The University of Arizona in the fall of 1987. During these years he was also a guest scientist at NIST in
Washington, D.C. His interests in muon-catalyzed fusion and other table-top fusion methods led him to a collaboration led by
Steven E. Jones working at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory. The start-up of experimental work on quark–gluon plasma has led to another enduring collaboration with the
University of Paris 7-Jussieu involving Jean Letessier. Rafelski has remained involved in the study of
quark–gluon plasma (QGP) and advancing
strangeness production as the pivotal QGP signature, and which has now become a new field of physics. also known as
Lorentz Invariant Aether. ==
Melting Hadrons, Boiling Quarks ==