Fernando Flor
I was born in Mexico City and have lived a majority of my life in Texas. As a first-generation college student, I have an immense amount of passion and interest in promoting diverse and inclusive spaces in STEM – with a particular focus on underrepresented minority groups from low-income communities. In my spare time, I like to ride and race bicycles across different disciplines.
From the phenomenological side, I am currently interested in the use of Statistical Hadronization Models (SHMs) in the context of both predicting experimental hadronic yields in Relativistic Heavy Ion and Elementary Particle Collisions across a wide center-of-mass energy range, as well as determining freeze-out parameters – e.g. chemical freeze-out temperature and baryochemical potential – from experimental data from both the ALICE and STAR experiments. I have used the SHM approach to provide evidence for a flavor-dependent chemical freeze-out in the cross-over region of the QCD phase diagram via a two temperature framework capable of describing experimental data for light and strange hadrons [1,2]. I aim to expand the two-temperature chemical freeze-out approach beyond the strange sector into the charm sector in order to provide further evidence of a flavor hierarchy at freeze-out. From the experimental side, I am interested in the detection and reconstruction of strange, multi-strange, charm, and multi-charm baryons produced in heavy ion and elementary particle collisions.
[1] F.A. Flor, G. Olinger, and R. Bellwied. Flavour and Energy Dependence of Chemical Freeze-out Temperatures in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions from RHIC BES to LHC Energies. Phys. Lett. B 814 (2021), 136098. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2021.136098)
[2] F.A. Flor, G. Olinger, and R. Bellwied. System Size and Flavour Dependence of Chemical Freeze-out Temperatures in ALICE pp, pPb and PbPb Collisions at LHC Energies. (2021). arXiv:2109.09843 [nucl-ex]. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.09843.pdf)