Monday, March 21, 2016, 1:00 PM, room 385
Prof Megan Connors (Georgia State University and Riken BNL Research Center)
Probing the Quark Gluon Plasma with Jets at RHIC and LHC

Immediately following the Big Bang, quarks and gluons also called partons, moved freely in a hot dense medium known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) before becoming confined into the nuclear matter we have today. Particle colliders such as RHIC on Long Island and the LHC at CERN in Switzerland are able to create this QGP phase by colliding heavy ions at high energies. In the early stage of heavy ion collisions, partons from the incoming nuclei which collide with a high momentum transfer will produce outgoing high momentum partons that will fragment into collimated sprays of particles called jets. Because the partons, from the jets originate, are produced early in the collision they experience all stages of the collision and will travel through the created QGP phase. As the partons traverse the QGP, they interact and lose energy. We can quantify the interactions and properties of the QGP by measuring this energy loss as a function of jet momentum, temperature and pathlength. High momentum particles were used as a proxy to measure jets in 200 GeV Au+Au collisions at RHIC where disentangling jet particles from the underlying event in heavy ion collisions is extremely challenging. At LHC higher momentum jets are produced in the >2 TeV collisions which makes reconstructing jets more achievable. The ability to use techniques developed at LHC, to measure jets at RHIC is being explored. The need and status of a new jet detector proposed at RHIC will be presented in addition to what we have learned about the QGP from jets so far.




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