The principal objective of the PhD studies is to investigate the dynamical properties of a novel state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), created in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The goal of the project is to perform measurements of the modification of heavy-quark production and heavy-quark elliptic flow in gold-gold collisions at the centre-of-mass energy of 54.4 GeV in the STAR experiment at RHIC, utilizing electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays.
Heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are ideal tomographic probes of the QGP properties as they are produced before the hot and dense medium is created and participate in the whole collision evolution losing part of their energy by interacting with the QGP. They provide direct access to the medium transport properties, like the spatial diffusion coefficient, which can be extracted by comparing experimental results to different theoretical model predictions. Moreover, comparison of results from 54.4 GeV to the previous STAR results at the top energy of 200 GeV, will allow one to access a possible temperature-dependent modification in the transport properties of the QGP and the degree of the medium thermalization.
Literatura / reference:
[1] F. Prino, R. Rapp; Open Heavy Flavor in QCD Matter and in Nuclear Collisions, J.Phys.G 43 (2016) 9, 093002, https://doi.org/10.1088/0954-3899/43/9/093002
[2] X. Dong, Y-J. Lee, R. Rapp; Open Heavy-Flavor Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions, Ann.Rev.Nucl.Part.Sci. 69 (2019) 417-445, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-nucl-101918-023806
[3] A. Andronic et al.: Heavy-flavour and quarkonium production in the LHC era: from proton–proton to heavy-ion collisions, Eur.Phys.J. C76 (2016) no.3, 107, https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3819-5
[4] L. Adamczyk et al. (STAR Collaboration): Elliptic flow of electrons from heavy-flavor hadron decays in Au + Au collisions at √sNN=200, 62.4, and 39 GeV, Phys. Rev. C 95, 034907, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.95.034907
[5] H. Agakishiev et al. (STAR Collaboration): High pT nonphotonic electron production in p+p collisions at √s=200 GeV, Phys. Rev. D 83, 052006, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.83.052006