1. UCLA High Energy & Astro-Particle (HEAP) Seminar
“QCD frontiers in high energy nuclear physics: quantum correlation and many-body interactions” Presented by Zhongbo Kang, LANL
The exploration of the fundamental structure of strongly interacting matter has been and still is at the frontier of high energy nuclear physics research. One of the most challenging questions in this field for the past several decades and the future is to understand how quarks and gluons form nucleons and nuclei, and to describe their properties in terms of the dynamics of QCD. Although the rich and nonlinear equation of motion made it very difficult, if not impossible, to solve QCD analytically, the asymptotic freedom makes QCD perturbation theory reliable and responsible for the most amazing known stories of QCD as the theory of strong interaction. In this talk, I will demonstrate how QCD perturbation theory serves as a useful tool for exploring novel quantum correlation in the nucleon’s spin structure, as well as for understanding the quantum many-body interactions taken place in the relativistic heavy ion collisions. In the first part of my talk, I introduce so-called Sivers effect which encapsulates a quantum correlation between the parton’s transverse momentum and the spin of the proton. I will demonstrate how it exhibits direct physical implications of the gauge potential in a similar way as the Aharonov-Bohm effect does in Electrodynamics, as well as how it reveals new structure of the nucleon. I will then talk about how perturbative QCD and effective field theory techniques can be used to study jets and jet substructure in both p+p and A+A collisions, which in turn plays an essential role in probing the properties of the hot quark gluon plasma created at both RHIC and the LHC.
Location: Knudsen 4-134
Date: Wednesday, May 25th, 2016
Time: 12:00pm
Pizza at 12:15pm