Dissertation Defense: David Stewart, Yale University, "Jet to Event Activity Correlations in Small System Collisions at STAR"
Heavy ion collisions at the LHC and RHIC produce a quark gluon plasma (QGP), in which quarks and gluons are deconfined into an extended medium. This “fourth phase” of matter is also believed to have been the first material phase of the universe following the Big Bang. In experiment, high energy partons scatter at short time scales and may subsequently lose energy, or are “quenched”, via interactions with the QGP.