Traversing the Flavorful Universe: Insights into Heavy Quarks from Heavy Ion Collisions

by Dr Zhaozhong Shi (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Thursday Mar 14, 2024, 3:30 PM → 4:30 PM Pacific/Honolulu

Room 112 (Watanabe Hall)

The Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics serves as the cornerstone for understanding the fundamental constituents of the universe. Within this paradigm, charm and beauty quarks, representing the heavy flavor sector, exhibit intriguing natures, including masses above the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) scale, charge-parity violation, and the emergence of exotic hadrons. As a result, precision measurements of heavy flavor physics are currently being performed by experiments at electron-positron colliders such as Belle II and BES III. Remarkably, heavy-ion collisions not only utilize heavy quarks to probe the QCD systems but also can offer alternative perspectives for studying heavy flavor physics including hadronization and spin polarization. In this colloquium, I will present the selected charm and beauty hadron measurements with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider and charmonium studies with the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Furthermore, I will report projected heavy flavor physics performance with sPHENIX and its readiness for data taking and analysis. I will also discuss the opportunities for heavy flavor and exotic hadron physics at the future Electron-Ion Collider. Finally, I will explore cutting-edge technologies, such as machine learning, streaming readout electronics, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) integrated circuits, and high-performance computing, which are revolutionizing high-energy physics experiments. 

DrZ_Shi_UH_Physics Colloquium.pdf

Video - Dr. Z. Shi