Undergraduate

Jet declustering techniques have brought up the possibility to access the Lund plane of QCD emissions in jets. By scanning different areas of the Lund jet plane, sensitivity to different physics effects can be enhanced, including quark mass effects. In this talk I will discuss the techniques and the measurement by ALICE (Nature 605, 440-446 (2022)) of the first direct signature of the dead cone effect in QCD. I will also discuss the problematics of the Lund plane in heavy ion collisions and prospects.

Collective quantum effects should play a significant role in the formation of hadrons from a deconfined and chirally symmetric state of matter. Yet most of our models ignore these effects or treat them as corrections after the dynamic calculation (e.g. color reconnection effects in PYTHIA). I will try to show that there is a direct connection between the entanglement entropy in the initial state and the thermodynamic entropy in the final state at least for elementary collisions where not too many decoherence effects are expected.

The Wright Lab community is invited to a weekly meeting on Mondays at 9:30 a.m to hear about and discuss what is going on at the lab.

Microspheres have been the first objects optically levitated by Arthur Ashkin in the 1970s. While the technology itself was successfully used to trap atoms to explore new physics, the actual utilization of microspheres and other macroscopic objects as a useful tool for physics has emerged in the recent years. The unique properties of those levitated objects allows to deploy them as sensors with unmatched properties and advantages.

Why is the universe dominated by matter, and not antimatter? Neutrinos, with their changing flavors and tiny masses, could provide an answer. If the neutrino is a Majorana particle, meaning that it is its own antiparticle, it would reveal the origin of the neutrino’s mass, demonstrate that lepton number is not a conserved symmetry of nature, and provide a path to leptogenesis in the early universe. To discover whether this is the case, we must search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, a theorized process that would occur in some nuclei.