Phenomenology

High-energy nuclear collisions enable physicists to probe fundamental aspects of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), which describes the strong interaction between fundamental particles. Although the hot QCD matter, which is produced in the particle collision, cannot be directly accessed by experiment, the distributions of emitted particles can be measured and conclusions about the underlying physical structure can be inferred.

Phenomenology links theory and experiment by describing and predicting experimental data using theoretical models. For heavy-ion collisions, a relativistic fluid-dynamic description of the evolution of the hot QCD medium consisting of quarks and gluons, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), has shown great success in describing experimental data.

The research of our group focuses on the applicability of relativistic hydrodynamics with mode-expansion to the process of heavy-ion collisions. In particular, we try to understand properties of the QGP, which can be inferred from systematic studies of data-to-model fits of theoretical predictions to high-precision measurements from the ALICE collaboration.
One of the main objectives of our group is the study of transport coefficients (e.g. viscosities) and initial conditions, which provide meaningful insights to the underlying physical processes of a heavy-ion collision.
We pursue the extension of the fluid-dynamic description to more observables (such as particle spectra or flow-coefficients) to establish a consistent phenomenology description of the QGP.

NEWS OF JUNE 2024:
WE GOT THE FUNDING FOR FOUR MORE YEARS OF RESEARCH IN ISOQUANT!

We are now involved in three projects, and we have several positions open!

A02: From QCD transport to particle yields (read more)

C06: Flow, extreme magnetic fields, and data-driven analysis of hadronic collisions (read more)

ABC: Origins of collectivity in few-body systems (read more)

Further contact persons in the group

Federica Capellino, Ilya Selyuzhenkov, Andrea Dubla