Jennifer Klay
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Physics
Less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons. This soup is called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP).
- Fields
Physics
- Topics
nuclear physics
particle physics
heavy-ion collisions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Install and commission the ALICE Fast Interaction Trigger (FIT) detector at the CERN LHC for Run 3 with undergraduate researchers.
- Monitor FIT operations and analyze its performance in selecting rare heavy-ion collision events.
- Support ALICE measurements of heavy-flavor hadrons, thermal photons, low-mass di-electrons and jets that probe quark-gluon plasma properties predicted by QCD.
More about the research
Physicists recreate it by smashing heavy atomic nuclei together at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The ALICE experiment studies it to test quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong nuclear force. Key open questions include how quarks become bound into particles, a property called confinement, and how this matter behaves at extreme temperature.
Why it matters
This is basic science. By helping ALICE select and study rare collisions, the work adds to understanding of the earliest matter in the universe and of the strong nuclear force. That understanding feeds into a fuller picture of how the early universe evolved. Undergraduates gain hands-on experience with large detector instrumentation in an international collaboration.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jinfeng Liao
Indiana University, IN·Physics
Quantify chirality transport through the chiral magnetic effect (CME) in quark-gluon plasma, using anomalous viscous hydrodynamics simulations and Bayesian analysis of heavy-ion data across many beam energies.
Rosi Reed
Lehigh University, PA·Physics
Measure how jet energy loss in quark-gluon plasma depends on temperature, density and path length, using dijet momentum imbalance and jet v2 from STAR and sPHENIX at RHIC.
Nikolaos Kidonakis
Kennesaw State University, GA·Physics
Calculate soft-gluon corrections, from low-energy gluon radiation, to top-antitop pair, single-top, and top-pair-plus-Z or Higgs production at NNLO and N3LO, including differential distributions for LHC and future colliders.
The school
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo: 7 labs on PI Pages, $38M a year on research.
More about California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
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