Research Overview
My research focuses on high-energy collisions of heavy nuclei like lead and gold. These heavy-ion collisions are among the most complex and fascinating systems on earth: they produce the quark-gluon plasma, an exotic liquid of free quarks and gluons that was the state of all matter in the universe in the microseconds after the big bang. However studying the quark-gluon plasma is extremely challenging because its lifetime is 1e-23 seconds – 1000 times shorter than the fastest laser pulses. A major challenge that I tackle in my research is how we can best analyze this complex data – thousands of particles per event, over millions of events – to infer the properties of the quark-gluon plasma with high precision.
I gave a lecture on my research aimed at general audiences as part of the Morning of Theoretical Physics series in Oxford, which you can watch here.
