PhD Defense by Emil Gorm Dahlbæk Nielsen

Title: Characterising the initial conditions of heavy-ion collisions at the LHC with anisotropic flow and mean transverse momentum

Abstract:

The early universe consisted of a hot and dense matter of deconfined quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which we can recreate in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The properties of the QGP are a key part of understanding the fundamental strong interactions, and the largest source of uncertainty in extracting the properties is the poor understanding of the initial conditions of the heavy-ion collisions.

During the defence, I will talk about observables of anisotropic flow and mean transverse momentum of produced particles that can constrain various aspects of the initial conditions, including the intrinsic shape of the colliding nuclei. Finally, you will hear how the correlation between the anisotropic flow and mean transverse momentum offers a direct probe of the initial state of heavy-ion collisions and the impact of these observables on the current state-of-the-art models.