Diogo Costa, a Physics Master’s student at IST and member of the Pheno Group at LIP, successfully defended his master’s thesis on Wednesday, November 27th. The thesis, titled “Improving the vacuum baseline for in-medium jet physics studies”, was supervised by Liliana Apolinário (LIP/IST) and Alba Soto-Ontoso (University of Granada). The defense jury included Mário Pimenta (LIP/IST, President), Armesto Pérez (Santiago de Compostela, Opponent), Guilherme Milhano (LIP/IST, Opponent), and Alba Soto-Ontoso (Supervisor Representative).
Diogo’s research tackled the importance of precision in theoretical models for heavy-ion collisions. By incorporating next-to-leading order (NLO) calculations into baseline proton-proton collision simulations, he investigated their impact on jet substructure observables. The results suggest that while the corrections from NLO calculations are small, they could become critical for precision measurements of the Quark-Gluon Plasma as experimental uncertainties decrease in future studies.
Congratulations to Diogo on this achievement and for contributing to advancing our understanding of QCD and heavy-ion physics!