Development of Monte Carlo programs for relativistic hadronic and heavy-ion collisions

Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions offer a unique opportunity to study the nuclear phase diagram at high temperatures and densities. The matter under such extreme conditions probably has existed in the early Universe within the first few fm/c after the Big Bang. Therefore, it is very tempting to investigate the properties of the Little Big Bang in the laboratory, and to search for a new state of matter, predicted by the fundamental theory of strong interactions - Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), namely, a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons or quark-gluon plasma (QGP).

To describe such complex phenomenon one has to rely on phenomenological models, which can be subdivided into macroscopic, i.e. thermal and hydrodynamic, and microscopic Monte Carlo models, incorporating partonic and hadronic degrees of freedom in a consistent fashion. These models are indispensable for the comparison with the experimental data coming from current heavy-ion accelerators and for planning the new machines such as FAIR at GSI, NICA at JINR, and FCC at CERN, which is widely discussed nowadays.

In Oslo we use several MC models at our disposal, namely,  Ultra-relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics (UrQMD) and Quark-Gluon String Model (QGSM) for description of various hadronic and nuclear collisions, and HYDrodynamics with JETs (HYDJET++) model for  simulation of heavy-ion collisions.

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The list of possible topics for MSc theses can be formulated as follows:

  1. relaxation of hot and dense nuclear matter to thermal and chemical equilibrium; extraction of transport coefficients (shear and bulk  viscosity):
  2. development of anisotropic flow (directed, elliptic, triangular and so forth) in expanding fireball at energies from few GeV to several TeV;
  3. directed and elliptic flow in proton-proton collisions;
  4. gluon shadowing and other cold nuclear matter effects;
  5. forward-backward multiplicity correlations in proton-proton and  heavy-ion collisions;
  6. event-by-event fluctuations;
  7. investigation of the role of geometric and dynamic anisotropy in heavy-ion collisions.

During your study you will get a chance to visit leading scientific centers, meet top-class physicists, attend scientific conferences throughout the world, and present the results of your study there. 

Tags: heavy ion physics, Theoretical physics, Monte Carlo metods, ALICE, LHC, CERN, quark-gluon plasma, QCD
Published Mar. 15, 2021 2:18 PM - Last modified Apr. 11, 2023 1:23 PM

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