Thesis

Towards a Yoctosecond Imaging tool of the Quark-Gluon Plasma.

• Call:

  PT-CERN Call 2021/1

• Academic Year:

  2021

• Domain:

  Astroparticle Physics

• Supervisor:

  José Guilherme Milhano

• Co-Supervisor:

  Liliana Apolinário

• Institution:

  Instituto Superior Técnico (Universidade de Lisboa)

• Host Institution:

  Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas

• Abstract:

  The main aim of this PhD thesis is to formulate the theoretical and phenomenological framework allowing for experimental measurements of the spatio-temporal evolution of the hot and dense matter created in high energy heavy-ion collisions - the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Jets are abundantly produced in collider experiments and they allow for stringent tests of QCD, given that their evolution spans a wide range of scales - from the initial hard scale of the collision to the hadronic scale at which they are detected. When jets are produced in the presence of a QGP which they propagate through, as in heavy ion collisions, this range of scales allows them to be sensitive to the QGP at different timescales. To endow jets with the ability to probe the time evolution of the QGP, time-ordered momentum- and coordinate-space descriptions of in-QGP jet evolution will be established, an endeavor motivated by the natural space-time reference frame introduced by jet-QGP interactions. Subsequently, a probabilistic implementation of these theoretical descriptions will be pursued, along with its incorporation in existing QGP simulations. The work culminates with the validation of the previous implementation’s outcomes through existing phenomenological tools and subsequent Quantum Chromodynamics-based and Machine Learning aided development of novel observables which can potentiate QGP yoctosecond-resolution tomographical measurements to be explored at the Large Hadron Collider.