About me:
I am originally from Dublin, Ireland. Since October 2020, I have been working towards my PhD under the supervision of Jacopo Ghiglieri at SUBATECH in Nantes, France studying jet quenching in the context of heavy-ion collisions. I am scheduled to defend my PhD in September 2023 and am currently looking for postdoc opportunities that will start thereafter.
Being sensitive to physics at multiple scales, some of jets’ most salient features can be naturally described using effective field theories. Indeed, the main theme of my PhD has been to try and build upon this success within the framework of finite temperature quantum field theory, thereby maintaining a strong connection to first principles. In particular, I have used this approach as a means to rigorously push perturbative calculations of the transverse momentum broadening coefficient and the asymptotic mass to higher orders in the strong coupling constant.
Seminar Title:
Confronting jet-medium interactions in a weakly coupled QGP
Seminar Date:
May 2nd, 2023
Abstract:
The observation of jet quenching in heavy-ion collisions in early the 2000’s has provided great evidence in favour of the idea that a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is created in such experiments. Moving forward however, in order to obtain a better understanding of the jet quenching process, it is desirable to be able to more precisely quantify the jet-medium interactions and moreover their impact on jet energy loss calculations. During this talk, I will firstly highlight how these energy loss calculations are controlled by two objects: the asymptotic mass of the jet particle and the transverse momentum broadening kernel, which is closely related to the transverse momentum broadening coefficient, qhat. I will then sketch how a recent insight of Caron-Huot [1] has allowed soft corrections to the aforementioned quantities to be computed in electrostatic QCD (EQCD), both perturbatively and on the lattice. I will follow by demonstrating how this is related to my own work, namely, the perturbative determination of corrections to the asymptotic mass and the transverse momentum broadening coefficient within the context of thermal field theory. Finally, I will discuss in some more detail my recent work [2] on the transverse momentum broadening coefficient and how it fits in with the goal of attempting to more rigorously and precisely quantify the quenching of a jet as it traverses the QGP.
[1]: Caron-Huot, arxiv: 0811.1603
[2]: Ghiglieri, Weitz, arxiv: 2207.08842