NPA Seminar, Laura Havener, Yale, “Exploring QCD with quarks, gluons, and the quark-gluon plasma”
The smallest building blocks of matter, quarks and gluons (partons), are usually confined inside protons and neutrons (hadrons). At very high energies and temperatures, the partons become deconfined or “free”, forming a novel state of matter called the Quark-Gluon plasma (QGP). The QGP is produced at high-energy colliders by smashing together heavy ions and is found to be a nearly perfect fluid, but precise knowledge of its intrinsic properties is required. Jets are ideal probes of the QGP.