MITHIG group members participated in the Initial Stages 2019 conference at Columbia University in New York City, which is the fifth installment on the physics of the initial stages of high energy nuclear collisions.
On behalf of the CMS collaboration, Dr. Jing Wang from our group presented the physics results from the CMS collaboration in a plenary talk, highlighting several publications from our group including the dijet angular distributions in proton-lead collisions (Phys.Rev.Lett. 121 (2018) no.6, 062002), which provided strong constraints on the gluon nuclear parton distribution functions, and the nuclear modification of D0 mesons in jet (CMS-PAS-18-007), which is a new approach developed in MITHIG for the detection of the heavy quark diffusion and energy loss inside the Quark-Gluon Plasma.
Dr. Austin Baty, who recently graduated from MITHIG and is now a postdoc at Rice University, presented the two-particle correlation function results from ALEPH archived data, an effort led by Prof. Yen-Jie Lee, in a plenary talk. The highlight of this result is a stringent limit on the long-range associated yield, which is closely related with the Quark-Gluon Plasma formation in heavy ion collision. The “non-observation” of this signal (for the first time in high energy particle collider) brought new insights to the understanding of the long-range correlation observed in proton-proton, proton-lead and lead-lead collisions. Prof. Yen-Jie Lee was also invited to chair the plenary session on Thursday.