Speaker
Description
A few microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe existed in an extremely hot and dense phase where ordinary hadrons could not form and matter took the form of quark-gluon plasma (QGP). High-energy partons produced in initial hard scatterings traverse the expanding QGP and lose energy through multiple interactions with the medium constituents, a phenomenon known as jet quenching. To isolate the dependence of parton energy loss on traversed distance, a fully integrated simulation chain is employed. The JEWEL Monte Carlo event generator provides a microscopic description of parton showers and medium-induced energy loss, while realistic hydrodynamic backgrounds for lead-lead, oxygen-oxygen, and neon-neon collisions are supplied by the Trajectum framework. For each system, large event samples are generated, high transverse momentum hadrons are reconstructed, and the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ is evaluated as a function of transverse momentum. $R_{AA}$ quantifies jet quenching by comparing suppressed high-$p_T$ hadron yields in heavy-ion collisions to the corresponding yields in proton-proton baselines. Contrasting $R_{AA}$ across systems of different geometric size allows the variation of suppression with average in-medium path-length to be quantified. All analyses are performed within the Rivet environment, ensuring direct and reproducible comparison with published experimental results. Preliminary results and their implications for the underlying QCD dynamics of the QGP will be presented.
| Apply for student award at which level: | MSc |
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| Consent on use of personal information: Abstract Submission | Yes, I ACCEPT |