Active Physics & Astronomy Materials & Manufacturing

Jets in hot hadronic matter

Funder STFC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation University of Liverpool Source-published name: University of Liverpool
Funding £671K
Period Sept 2025 — Sept 2030

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

At CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, physicists smash lead nuclei together to create droplets of matter hotter than 100,000 times the centre of the Sun, briefly recreating the state of the early universe. This research targets a fundamental gap: we know the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) behaves like a near-perfect liquid, but we do not know how its collective motion emerges from the individual quarks and gluons inside it. The project will develop novel “scattering experiments” within the QGP itself—firing particles through the plasma to probe its internal structure—and combine the results with Bayesian statistical models to connect measurements directly to theory. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a new battery or medical device next year. But understanding how matter behaved a fraction of a second after the Big Bang tells us how the strong nuclear force—the force that binds protons and neutrons into atomic nuclei—actually works. That force governs the stability of all visible matter. Past fundamental research into the strong force led directly to technologies like particle accelerators used in cancer therapy and industrial imaging. A deeper map of the QGP’s internal structure could, over decades, inform new ways to manipulate matter at the subatomic scale.

View original technical description
My research objectives focus on studying the collisions of lead atomic nuclei at the highest-ever reachable energies, with the ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. These collisions generate temperatures over 100,000 times hotter than at the centre of the sun - the hottest temperatures achievable in a lab - and cause the protons and neutrons which make up atomic nuclei to 'melt' and form a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons (the sub-atomic elementary carriers of the strong force), known as the 'quark-gluon plasma' (QGP). The QGP is the state of matter that constituted the early universe, just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. My proposed research project aims to uncover, for the first time, the ‘deep’ structure of the QGP and how its collective behaviour determines the properties of its constituents. This will give insight into how the universe behaved at its inception under these extreme temperatures, and how hadronic matter (which forms almost all visible matter in the universe) is formed. This will be achieved via the development of novel 'scattering experiments' within the QGP, to be performed with the ALICE experiment at the LHC, alongside Bayesian parameter estimation analyses to connect these measurements to theory with the JETSCAPE collaboration.

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Researchers

Jaime Norman (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

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Ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions - Application for bridging support
Jet Physics at the LHC in and Beyond the Standard Model
Heavy-flavour and jet correlation measurements with the ALICE experiment at the LHC
Theory and phenomenology of hadronic jets in the Standard Model and beyond
ALICE Upgrade 2 (Silicon Physicist post)

Original classification

Fellowship

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