WIDG Seminar: Michael Oliver, Yale, “Jet and Jet-like Correlations in Heavy Ion Collisions with ALICE”

Event time: 
Thursday, January 17, 2019 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Wright Lab - Connector (EAL), WLC-245 See map
270 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

In ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the high temperatures (4 trillion Kelvin and above) allow an exotic form of nuclear matter known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) to exist for a few femtoseconds. The defining feature of this material is that its quarks and gluons are not confined into hadrons, but instead are freely interacting. An interesting effect of this is that the QGP is opaque to the jets of high momentum quarks and gluons formed by hard scatterings in the beginning of the collision. The details of this interaction remain poorly constrained, but it is typically modeled as a combination of radiative and collisional energy loss and scattering by the jets. Experimentally measuring the jets’ interaction with the medium can be done in many complementary ways, including searching for particles associated with a jet or pair of jets. To be presented are several (complete and ongoing) measurements concentrated on correlating final state hadrons with reconstructed jets or jet-like objects measured in collisions of lead ions in the ALICE detector at the LHC.