Center for Particles and Fields Seminar

Dr. Megan Connors, Yale University

"What Jets and Two-Particle Correlations Reveal about the Quark Gluon Plasma"

4:00pm, RLM 9.222

Abstract:
Relativistic heavy ion collisions can reproduce the conditions necessary to form a hot and dense medium known as the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), the state of the universe immediately following the Big Bang, in which quarks and gluons are deconfined. Results from experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which study the properties of the QGP, will be presented. This seminar will focus on two particle correlations and jet physics results in Pb-Pb and Au-Au collisions at the LHC and RHIC respectively and discuss the implications of using p-p or p-A systems as a reference for these A-A measurements. Jets are the result of a hard scattering, which occurs early in the collision process, and probe how partons interact and lose energy in the medium. Two particle correlations are used to study jet physics and energy loss as well as the underlying event. The interplay between the two is important for understanding how high momentum particles lose energy and for finding where that lost energy goes. To quantify the influence of the QGP on these measurements, it is important to have a good baseline measurement. A-A measurements are typically compared to expectations based on p-p collisions. Recent results on p-A collisions are used to quantify cold nuclear matter effects not captured in p-p collisions. However, p-A measurements have proven to be interesting in their own unexpected way.