Colloquium – Charles Gale

Charles Gale, McGill University

Distinguished James McGill Professor, Department of Physics

Light from the little bang: Photons from strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions

At high energy densities, matter interacting via the nuclear strong interaction transforms into an exotic state: the quark-gluon plasma. This material was produced a few microseconds after the Big Bang and is thought to exist in the core of massive stellar objects such as neutron stars, but also can be created in high-energy collisions of atomic nuclei. Those scattering events are performed at terrestrial laboratories such as RHIC (the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory) and the LHC (the Large Hadron Collider at CERN). I will discuss elements of the theory and models used to characterize the quark-gluon plasma produced in those collisions and I will highlight the special role played by the emitted electromagnetic radiation. I will show how those photons can reveal details of the conditions that existed at the moment of their creation, and how such studies inform us about QCD, the theory of the strong interaction.

Apr 13, 2023 @ 4:00pm Central in Stevenson 4327; reception beforehand at 3:30pm in Stevenson 6333

Host: J.-F. Paquet; co-hosted by VandyGRAF

To join via Zoom, please contact Reina Beach (reina.beach@vanderbilt.edu) to request the Zoom link.