From April 6-12, numerous past and present members of the Wright Lab Relativistic Heavy-Ion Group (RHIG) joined 950 scientists in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, for the 31st International Conference on Ultra-relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions, also known as Quark Matter 2025. Eight current members of RHIG presented their new experimental and phenomenological results through talks or poster presentations. Helen Caines, Horace D. Taft Professor of Physics and John Harris, D. Allan Bromley Professor Emeritus of Physics were also part of the conference’s International Advisory Committee (IAC).
Graduate students Sierra Cantway and Ananya Rai both gave talks on behalf of the ALICE collaboration demonstrating new preliminary results. Cantway showed that the particle composition in jets is modified by the quark gluon plasma (QGP). Rai demonstrated new preliminary results on energy correlators in jets.
Postdoctoral associate Isaac Mooney gave a poster presentation explaining STAR jet results on event shape engineering. Mooney also is the STAR Hard Probes Working Group Convener, which means he contributed to reviewing and approving STAR jet and heavy flavor results that were submitted for consideration to be included in the conference.
At the end of the conference, associate research scientist Mesut Arslandok gave an invited plenary talk on “Correlations and Fluctuations”.
Cantway said, “I had a great time at Quark Matter 2025! There were many interesting results shown for the first time at this conference. It was so exciting to experience the buzz around these results in person and to participate in lively discussions regarding them with experts in the field.”
Cantway continued, “After all the hard work that went into preparing for the conference, it was uplifting to see experts in the field get excited about my thesis research. I received lots of helpful feedback on my results and plenty of ideas for future analyses.”
Quark Matter 2025 brings together theoretical and experimental physicists from around the world to discuss new developments in high-energy heavy-ion physics. The focus of the discussions is on the fundamental understanding of strongly-interacting matter at extreme conditions, as formed in ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions, as well as on emergent QCD phenomena in high-multiplicity proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions.