Novel Probes of the Primordial Liquid

by Krishna Rajagopal (MIT)

Wednesday 12 Jun 2024, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

Heavy ion collisions reproduce droplets of the trillions-of-degrees-hot liquid that filled the microseconds-old universe, conventionally called quark-gluon plasma (QGP) but better thought of as hot quark-gluon soup. Over the past couple of decades, data obtained via recreating this primordial fluid have shown that it is the most liquid liquid in the universe, making it the first complex matter to form as well as the source of all protons and neutrons. After a brief look back at what we have learned about the formation and properties of this original liquid from heavy ion collisions, I will focus on the road ahead, in particular on new probes being developed to enable us to use data from the LHC and RHIC to answer questions like: How does a strongly coupled liquid emerge, given that what you will see if you can probe QGP with high resolution is weakly coupled quarks and gluons? How can we use jets to see the inner workings of QGP and answer this question? And how does the droplet of QGP ripple after it has been probed by a passing jet?

CERN -TH-Colloquium_June2024.pdf

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