ExHolo · Holography under extreme conditions
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-09-01 → 2022-08-31
- EU contribution
- €191,149
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Holography under extreme conditions
Fundamental research let to the formulation of the theory of Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD). QCD describes how the strong interaction mediates the exchange of particles. Via the experiments of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab and of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN one gets access to the relevant energy scales of the fundamental particles, the quarks and gluons, which are governed by QCD. The program of colliding heavy nuclei at ultra-relativistic speeds allows to gain insight on extreme matter under high temperatures and high pressures. This pushes humanities understanding of the constituents of the nuclei. In consequence this has a broad connection to a variety of fields, including astrophysics, neutrino physics and nuclear physics. This allows in consequence to get insights on the fundamental questions: how did the creation of matter in our universe happen after the big bang? how are the heavy nuclei composed and shaped? how do the high energy cosmic rays interact with our atmosphere and how does matter in compact stars behave? In particular this project aimed on providing new insights of extreme matter subject to high temperatures or high pressures. For the RHIC scan of the QCD phase diagram the project newly assessed various unstable first order phase transitions. With the heavy-ion theory group and a junior faculty ALICE experimentalist we studied the impact of the plasma on charm jets: The results we find are highly exciting as we predict a significant enhancement in jet chemistry for charm and anti-charm pair creation. This is a strong motivation for future high luminosity heavy-ion runs at the LHC.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Understanding the properties of extreme phases of nuclear matter is one of the major challenges in theoretical physics today. Matter at high temperatures dominated the first microsecond of the early universe and is nowadays produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions in the form of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Systematic experimental studies at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) support the picture of the QGP as an almost perfect fluid but the mechanism for its fast emergence from collisions of hadronic matter remains a puzzle to this day. Another surprising observation was the liquid-like behavior of small systems emerging from proton-proton or proton-lead collisions and the absence of jet quenching which is considered to be a crucial probe characterizing the strongly-coupled QGP.In this proposal I aim at finding a dynamical picture of the thermalisation of out-of-equilibrium matter into hydrodynamic fields by making use of a powerful new framework for studying strongly-coupled dynamical systems: the gauge/gravity duality. It allows to map the strongly-coupled gauge theory dynamics of colliding ions to the collision of gravitational shockwaves which is amenable to numerical general relativity. This offers a unique real-time approach to study the dynamics of hot matter out-of-equilibrium, which I will exploit to tackle two essential problems: i) out-of-equilibrium emergence of collectivity and the fast thermalization of the QGP; ii) system-size dependence of the momentum broadening by jets; This project is inter-disciplinary as it involves applying numerical gravity via holography to the physics of matter at extreme conditions, using the most advanced High-Performance-Computing techniques which I am an expert in. The understanding of the thermalisation scale, of jet quenching and the description of pre-flow, is essential for a determination of the QGP properties of heavy-ion collisions.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- ORGANISATION EUROPEENNE POUR LA RECHERCHE NUCLEAIRE · GENEVE 23CoordinatorSwitzerland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union