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The 39th edition of the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP 2018) was hosted in Seoul, South Korea from July 4th – 11th. ICHEP is the largest high energy physics conference in the world and serves as a vital platform for exchanging recent achievements and ideas in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. During the heavy ion session, undergraduate Anthony Badea gave a very interesting talk on the measurement of the “Two-Particle Correlation in e+ e- Collisions at 91.2 GeV with ALEPH Archived Data“. This result serves as an important step towards understanding the origin of collective flow phenomenon observed in small systems.
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The XXVII Quark Matter conference on ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions was held recently in Venice, Italy from May 12 to May 19. The MIT Heavy Ion Group sent a 14-member delegation to the conference, and set a record with 8 parallel talks and 2 posters being accepted. Early on May 15, Austin Baty kicked off the proceedings with his talk on “Charged particle nuclear modification factors in pPb, PbPb and XeXe collisions with the CMS experiment“, showing for the first time, measurements of charged-hadron suppression in xenon-xenon collisions at the LHC.
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Zhaozhong Shi
Our second-year graduate student Zhaozhong has been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF fellowship is a highly competitive fellowship supporting to U.S. graduate student working in STEM and social sciences. The fellowship recipients will be awarded stipends as well as the education allowance. The length of the fellowship is three years.
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Wit Busza, Francis Friedman Professor of Physics, Emeritus Professor of Emeritus Wit Busza, along with Professor Krishna Rajagopal from Center of Theoretical at MIT, and Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Wilke van der Schee from Center of Theoretical Physics at MIT, were invited to write a review paper for Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science.
The preprint version of this paper, Heavy Ion Collisions: The Big Picture, and the Big Questions, is available on arXiv. This paper reviews the theoretical and experimental studies of relativistic heavy-ion physics at RHIC and LHC. It is an excellent introductory material for students to learn the physics motivations, general formulations, big questions, and future directions of relativistic heavy ion physics. We are proud of Wit’s great contributions in relativistic heavy-ion physics!
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The Fermilab Test Beam Facilities where sPHENIX test beam was carried out. In addition to the CMS experiment at CERN, the MIT Heavy Ion Group also involves in the planned sPHENIX experiment at RHIC. Currently, Professor Gunther Roland is serving as the spokesperson for the sPHENIX experiment. Graduate student Zhaozhong Shi has been working on the sPHENIX electromagnetic calorimeter. The 2018 sPHENIX Test Beam (T-1044), which tests the prototypes of the EMCAL, HCAL, MVTX, and INTT subdetectors, has been successfully carried out at Fermilab Test Beam Facilities from Feb 21 to Mar 28. This Test Beam project served as an important part of the validation and testing process of the sPHENIX experiment
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Dr. Gian Michele Innocenti in our group got a staff scientist position at CERN. He will start working in September 2018. Congratulations on Gian Michele and wish him to have greater achievement at CERN in the future.
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The 2nd International Workshop on QCD Challenges from pp to AA was hosted in Puebla City (Mexico) from 31 Oct to 3 Nov 2017. More than fifty high energy and heavy ion theoretical and experimental physicists were in attendance discussing the progress on the understanding of the collective, and possible QGP signals in the hot dense QCD systems of the fundamental strongly interacting matter. Prof. Gunther Roland was invited to give a plenary talk discussing the development of jets study as probes of QGP. Several important measurements were presented by MITHIG members.
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PRL Coverpage and Figure 2-bottom in the paper. Distribution of the transverse momentum ratio x_{jZ} between the jet and the Z boson. Compared to pp data, the distribution in PbPb is shifted to left indicating that the jets lose energy after interacting with the QCD medium.
Our measurement of jet quenching using Z+jet correlations has been published in PRL and chosen as the cover of corresponding issue (See the synopsis from the PRL journal).
Properties of the quark-gluon plasma can be inferred from measurements of jets and Z bosons simultaneously produced in the ion collisions that create the plasma. Z bosons interact with the QGP much more weakly than the partons do, so they don’t lose energy as they travel through it. Thus the bosons energy is very close to the initial energy of the partons emerging from the ion collisions. And the difference between the boson and parton energies can reveal the QGP’s properties.
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The XXVI Quark Matter conference on ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions was held recently in Chicago, USA from 5 Feb to 11 Feb 2017. The MITHIG sent a 11-member delegation to the conference and contributed to the proceedings with a plenary talk by Prof. Yen-Jie Lee summarizing the recent exciting results from the CMS heavy-ion group, 2 talks in the parallel sessions and 3 posters. Prof. Gunther Roland also gave a student lecture on the evolution of jet measurements as probes of the Quark Gluon Plasma, as a prelude to the conference.
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The 8th edition of the International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-energy Nuclear Collisions (Hard Probes 2016) was hosted in Wuhan (China) on September 23 – 27. Hard Probes is one of the most important conference in our field and it is particularly focused on the recent experimental and theoretical developments on hard and electromagnetic probes in heavy-ion collisions. Several new measurements were presented by MITHIG members in parallel and plenary talks.
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