Experimentally Probing the Properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma with Jets

by Timothy Rinn (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign)

Thursday 20 May 2021, 13:00 → 14:00 US/Eastern

Relativistic heavy ion collisions enable the production of a state of strongly interacting deconfined nuclear matter called the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). A variety of both strongly and electromagnetically interacting probes have provided valuable insight to the properties of the QGP. This seminar will focus on measurements using “jets”, narrow cones of high momentum correlated particles produced by the fragmentation and hadronization of a quark or gluon. Jets are a powerful probe of this nuclear medium as the partons inside the jet are expected to lose energy as they interact with the medium, causing the phenomenon known as jet quenching. Through studying a variety of jet properties at both the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), insight can be gained on the mechanisms behind jet quenching. This seminar will discuss recent experimental results on jet quenching from both RHIC and the LHC, as well as highlight the exciting prospects for future insights to be gained from the under construction sPHENIX detector.

Experimentally Probing the Properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma with Jets.pdf