Speaker
Isobel Kolbe
(University of Cape Town)
Description
In the heavy ion experiments at RHIC and the LHC, a state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) has been produced. The so-called ‘hard particles’, or particles with very high momentum that are produced as a consequence of the asymptotic freedom of QCD, can be used as tomographic probes of the QGP. We will study the way in which energy is dissipated in this QGP by calculating, in pQCD, corrections to the well-known energy loss formulae for short path lengths. This is necessary to address the discovery at the LHC that shockingly small systems appear to be exhibiting collective behaviour. We will also attempt to incorporate the running-coupling corrections to existing calculations in order to realise a quantitative theoretical understanding of energy loss processes.
