Jets in hot hadronic matter

My research objectives focus on studying the collisions of lead atomic nuclei at the highest-ever reachable energies, with the ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. These collisions generate temperatures over 100,000 times hotter than at the centre of the sun - the hottest temperatures achievable in a lab - and cause the protons and neutrons which make up atomic nuclei to 'melt' and form a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons (the sub-atomic elementary carriers of the strong force), known as the 'quark-gluon plasma' (QGP). The QGP is the state of matter that constituted the early universe, just fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
My proposed research project aims to uncover, for the first time, the ‘deep’ structure of the QGP and how its collective behaviour determines the properties of its constituents. This will give insight into how the universe behaved at its inception under these extreme temperatures, and how hadronic matter (which forms almost all visible matter in the universe) is formed. This will be achieved via the development of novel 'scattering experiments' within the QGP, to be performed with the ALICE experiment at the LHC, alongside Bayesian parameter estimation analyses to connect these measurements to theory with the JETSCAPE collaboration.