Theoretical Physics Colloquium
Many more charm at the freezeout?
by Dr. Sayantan Sharma (Brookhaven National Lab.)
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
from
to
(Asia/Kolkata)
at AG69
at AG69
Description |
Understanding the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter described by Quantum Chromodynamics(QCD) is an exciting field of research. There are large scale ongoing experiments in RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory and at CERN aimed at recreating and studying the properties of the QCD matter under extreme conditions that existed in the very early universe. Lattice gauge theory has emerged as the most effective theoretical technique that has provided us with exciting insights on the properties of the hot QCD matter. The fluctuations of conserved quantum numbers is an important observable that gives us information about the underlying degrees of freedom and the interactions present in the medium. In this talk, I will discuss about our recent work where we specifically look into the fluctuations of heavy charm quarks in the hot QCD medium to have a glimpse of the underlying baryon and meson spectrum made up of charm for the first time. Using lattice techniques, we determine where these baryons and mesons melt into quark degrees of freedom as the medium is heated up, to understand the fundamental properties of QCD as well the experimental consequences. In the experiments, one measures the particle abundances at the "freezeout surface" when the hot soup of quarks and gluons condense into baryons and mesons. Our study shows that there are many more experimentally yet to be observed charmed baryons that needs to be considered to describe the thermodynamics at the freezeout. I also discuss about extension of our work to another important experimental observable on freezeout of strange baryons. |