"Multiparticle correlations as a tool to study the properties of the strongly interacting QGP"

by Prof. Raimond Snellings (Utrecht University)

Monday 25 Nov 2013, 14:15 → 15:45 Europe/Berlin

3344 (TUM - Physics Department - Garching)

In the world around us, quarks and gluons do not exist as free particles because they are permanently bound in hadrons by the strong interaction. At very high temperatures and densities however, hadronic matter is expected to undergo a phase transition to a new state of matter where quark and gluon degrees of freedom are not anymore confined inside the hadrons. This new state of matter is called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Such temperatures and densities were reached in the early universe until the first microseconds after the Big Bang. Not only in the early universe, but also in heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies it is possible to reach temperatures and densities well above the QCD phase-transition. Currently, the highest temperatures and energy densities are reached in collisions of heavy-ions at the Large Hadron Collider. At the LHC, the ALICE detector is built to precisely measure the properties of the QGP and the QCD phase transition. In this colloquium I will discuss the surprising properties of this QGP and how we have measured this.