On Tuesday, January 29, at 3:30 pm (Riddick 400P), Douglas Wertepny will present a seminar "Modeling the initial conditions of heavy ion collisions".
Abstract:
Heavy ion collisions are a topic of intense research due to the fact that is is one of the few situations in nature where a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) can form. Theoretical studies of these are complicated by the fact that at various stages of the process different physical phenomena take over and dominate. In order to fully understand heavy ion collisions one must have a detailed understanding of the early time dynamics. We model these initial conditions by using the saturation/Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework, which takes into account the initial high energy scattering. While this formalism has been used to calculate the initial gluon distributions to reasonable success we are currently expanding this to include the initial distribution of quarks and anti-quarks and comparing to non-flow correlations.
The goal is to incorporate conserved quantum numbers carried by quarks into the initial conditions of hydrodynamics and to compare the results to the purely initial state effects. We present preliminary results on two fronts: the spatial distributions of the expected quark/anti-quark pairs in the initial conditions, and a comparison of non-flow angular correlations arising from CGC to collective flow in hydrodynamics. On the quark/anti-quark front we find a strong coupling between quark flavor and collision geometry, and on the correlation front we do an event by event comparison between two-gluon correlations in the CGC at high-p_T and the corresponding anisotropic flow for the same event.