Universe Colloquium: Dielectron studies in Heavy Ion Collision experiments

by Oton Vazquez Doce (TUM)

Wednesday 20 Jan 2016, 16:30 → 17:30 Europe/Berlin

seminar room (Excellence Cluster Universe, Boltzmannstrasse 2, Garching)

Electromagnetic radiation is the ideal probe to study the formation of hot and dense matter in heavy ion collisions. Real and virtual photons are produced in all the stages of the collision, allowing to study the whole system evolution. Moreover, electromagnetic radiation is transparent to the medium bringing information unaffected by final state interactions. By detecting photons and dileptons one can study the system temperature, via the extraction of thermal radiation, and the chiral symmetry restoration that is expected to happen in the deconfined phase via the modification of the spectral funcions of vector mesons. We review the experimental dielectron studies in Heavy Ion Collisions, from RHIC to the LHC, with particular focus on the expectations from the recently collected data from Pb-Pb collisions at centre-of-mass energies per nucleon pair of 5 TeV by the ALICE experiment. The Universe Colloquium is followed by a social gathering with wine and cheese.