Speaker
Description
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is a rich area of Particle Physics with much still to be understood. Namely, analytical derivations from first principles of the emergent phenomena of hadronisation and associated colour confinement have yet to be found. This drives a search for inputs from the experimental exploration of QCD, such as the heavy ion collisions performed at RHIC and the LHC.
In these collisions, the enormous energy densities reached upon impact allow reaching exotic phases of quark-gluon matter whose study may contribute to advancing our knowledge of QCD. One such phase is the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), where quarks and gluons (partons) exist unconfined but strongly-coupled to each other, and which is well described by relativistic hydrodynamics as a low-viscosity fluid. Some of the properties of the QGP have been inferred from studying its effect on rare high-momentum quarks and gluons which traverse it before generating showers of hadrons - jets - which are detected. The loss of energy these jets experience traversing the QGP when compared to their conterparts formed in vacuum is dubbed jet quenching.
This work aims to study the contribution from the pre-QGP medium, named Glasma, to the observed jet-quenching via use of the Colour Glass Condensate (CGC) formalism developed to describe the environment within the nucleons of atomic nuclei; this suggests it is adequate to describe the earliest stages of the medium formed in the collision. In this formalism, the saturation of low-momentum gluons in the nucleons allows them to be treated as classical colour fields which obey the Classical Yang-Mills equations.
Throughout the months of this work, we are expected to perform: a literary review on Jet Quenching and the CGC; becoming acquainted with techniques to calculate quantities in the CGC relevant to jet quenching; reproducing the results of two papers calculating transport coefficients in the CGC for proper times 0 and larger than 0 post-collision; combining results to obtain a consistent description of transport coefficients between proper times 0 and 0.1 fm/c.