Welcome to Mesut Arslandok who comes to us from Heidelberg University as an Associate Research Scientist working with Helen Caines.
He will be working in the ALICE collaboration at the LHC.
He has been involved in the ALICE experiment at CERN since 2010. His research covers many aspects of experimental heavy-ion physics such as detector physics and operation, software development, simulations and physics analysis.
He has been serving as the convener of the physics analysis group on even-by-event fluctuations since 2019, and carrying out several physics analyses on this field such as conserved charge, net-proton and particle ratio fluctuations. These analyses are expected to shed light on the understanding of an extreme phase of matter - called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) - created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. This primordial state of matter is thought to have existed for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The QGP created in these collisions undergoes a transition to the hadronic phase, after it expands and cools down. Event-by-event fluctuations are very sensitive to this phase transition, therefore it also plays a significant role within the energy scan programs of the CERN SPS and RHIC.
Moreover, as a member of the TPC (Time Projection Chamber) detector group, he has been taking part in the operation of the TPC and working on the calibration and optimization of the TPC particle identification (PID) performance in both MWPC (Multi-Wire Proportional Chambers) and GEM (Gas Electron Multiplier) based technologies. Furthermore, I am actively involved in the next-generation multi-purpose detector project at the LHC which is a follow-up to the present ALICE experiment (arXiv:1902.01211 [physics.ins-det]).
He is a big fan of tennis, snooker and chess and also enjoys traveling and reading, in particular history and philosophy.