DOMAIN: Particle and Astroparticle Physics and associated scientific domains
SUPERVISOR: Helena Santos
HOST INSTITUTION: Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas
DEGREE INSTITUTION: Universidade de Lisboa
ABSTRACT
Context: Ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provide an unique opportunity to recreate the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) in the laboratory energy frontier. This plasma of quarks and gluons, which is known to behave as a nearly perfect liquid, was the prevailing state of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. The capabilities of ATLAS, namely large acceptance and high granularity calorimeters, afford excellent handles for QGP studies. A major goal of the Heavy Ion Program of the LHC is the understanding of the effects of the QGP on jets, namely the study of the nature of the energy loss suffered by the quarks and gluons while crossing the QGP. The bottom quark, in particular, constitutes an excellent probe. Due to its large virtuality, Q, it has a formation time,∆t ≈1/Q ≈ 0.1 fm/c, much smaller than the formation time of the QGP at the LHC (≈10 fm/c). The understanding of the nature of the energy loss (either collisional or gluon radiative), by its turn, is crucial to infer the properties of the QGP. The HI ATLAS/LIP group is contributing with important developments preceding the b-jet physics analysis, namely on b-jet reconstruction, b-tagging and b-jet triggers in HI collisions.
Objectives: The student will participate in Pb+Pb data acquisition at CERN already during Run 3 (expected for the Falls of 2021-22-23-24) and will analyse the data. The analysis will explore strategies, namely machine learning techniques, to separate the b-quarks jets from light jets (mostly u- and d-quarks) and further separation of b-quarks jets originating directly from the hard process from those arising from gluon splitting with the aim of devising novel experimental observables sensitive to the different energy loss of quarks and gluons.
Requirements: This is an experimental PhD program. The work will be developed at LIP – Laboratorio de Instrumentacao e Fisica Experimental de Particulas. The student should have solid computing skills, namely in C++ programming. Furthermore, she/he will concurrently participate in the technical activities in which the ATLAS/LIP group is involved, namely in the Tile calorimeter and/or in Trigger systems.