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The Stopping Power of Hot Nuclear Matter

2014-09-22

The Purdue High Energy Nuclear Physics group played a major role in a recent measurement of the stopping power of hot nuclear matter on heavy quarks. This measurement was performed using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), designed in part to study the nature of the hottest and densest material ever created on Earth. 

In a high energy nuclear collision at the LHC, energy densities are so large that "quarks", the fundamental building block of the universe, are liberated from their confinement inside a nucleus and produce a soup-like medium known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP).  In conjunction with collaborators at Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet in Paris, France, Physics and Astronomy graduate student Kurt Jung and his advisor Prof. Wei Xie use heavy flavor jets, or groups of highly collimated energetic particles originating from heavy quarks, to quantify the interaction strength of the QGP with heavy quarks. This result is highlighted in the Viewpoint in Physics of Physical Review Letters. For further reading, please see the original article in Physical Review Letters:

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.132301

and its Viewpoint article:

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/97

Last Updated: May 4, 2016 4:29 PM

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