Project »FEATURE«: Far-from-Equilibrium ATtractors at Ultra-Relativistic Energies

UL FMF
Date of publication:
One of the grand challenges facing the high-energy physics community is understanding the far-from-equilibrium evolution of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This new postdoctoral Marie Skłodowska-Curie project, carried out at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, will take the critical step to bring theoretical understanding to the level of complexity required for realistic phenomenology, by fully characterizing the properties of the QCD attractor without resorting to simplifying assumptions done in the current preliminary studies. This will be done via the inclusion of fermionic degrees of freedom and by relaxing simplifying spatial symmetries.
The new insight gained will be applied to the phenomenological context to elevate the dynamical freeze-out process into a far-from-equilibrium process, thus leading to the full exploitation of data at experiments in the Large Hadron Collider and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
The attained knowledge will be also used to probe the attractor near the phase transition, providing vital insight into searches for the QCD critical point and provide an avenue to integrate magnetohydrodynamics into descriptions relevant for heavy ion collisions.
The FEATURE project will focus on uncovering the presence of attractors in a variety of theories relevant to heavy ion collisions by going beyond the usual simplifying assumptions. The new insight gained will be applied to the phenomenological context to elevate the dynamical freeze-out process into a far-from-equilibrium one, thus leading to the full exploitation of data at experiments in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL.
Dr. Alexander Soloviev completed his PhD in theoretical physics at the Vienna University of Technology (VUT), investigating thermalization and other aspects of heavy ion collisions employing theoretical tools, such as relativistic hydrodynamics, kinetic theory and holography. After this, he was awarded the Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship to undertake research on the chiral phase transition in Stony Brook University and at the TU Vienna.
Prof. dr. Sašo Grozdanov is an associate professor of physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Ljubljana and at the Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics of the University of Edinburgh. He received his BA degree from Harvard University, his masters from the University of Cambridge and his PhD from the University of Oxford. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University and at MIT. As a theoretical physicist, his work aims to discover the elementary laws that govern physics using theoretical and mathematical methods ranging from low to high energies: from hydrodynamics to quantum field theory, gravity and black holes, and string theory. Much of his research has focused on studying the dynamics of hot collective states that behave like liquids or plasmas. An example of such a state is the quark-gluon plasma that filled the early universe and that can now be created in particle accelerators through the collision of heavy ions.