Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) is a primordial form of nuclear matter that filled the Early Universe. Advancements in particle accelerator technologies have made it possible to recreate and study this form of matter in a laboratory by colliding heavy ions at ultra-relativistic energies. For the last two decades, scientists have embarked on a quest to understand the properties of QGP and the strong nuclear force that governs all nuclear matter. In heavy ion experiments, hard probes – high energy/momentum/mass particles and jets – constitute a versatile toolkit for tomographic studies of the created medium and have already redefined our initial notions about QGP. Among the now well-established signatures of QGP is a jet quenching phenomenon discovered via such hard probes. Manifestations of quenching, a net result of medium opaqueness to penetrating partons, appear in a variety of experimental observables: measured particle yields, angular correlations, rapidity, and momentum distributions of produced hadrons. In this talk, I will highlight several recent experimental results on QGP tomography and discuss these measurements in the context of partonic energy loss and parton-medium interactions in Quark Gluon Plasma.
Lecture
Lewis Lab 316
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