Exploring the Big Bang in the Lab with Femtoscopy
Along a series of discoveries, it turned out in the last decade that in high energy nuclear collisions, the so-called strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma (sQGP) is created, which also filled the Universe for the first microsecond of its existence. As the name indicates, this matter is governed by the strong interaction, which is responsible for confining the constituents of nuclei, as well as for most of the mass of atoms (thus for that of the observable Universe). The so-called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) successfully describes this interaction. A forefront of contemporary particle physics is to unveil the rich phase structure of QCD matter. It turned out that at small densities, strongly interacting matter has two thermodynamical phases: normal hadronic matter and Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). In the first microseconds of the existence of our Universe, the whole of space is thought to have been filled by the sQGP, a primordial soup of quarks and gluons. Understanding the phase structure of strong interaction is thus of primary importance in cosmology as well. In the last 50 years, heavy ion accelerators and corresponding large scale experiments were constructed, starting from the Berkeley Bevalac through BNL AGS, CERN SPS, BNL RHIC, and CERN LHC, in order to discover (and if exists, explore the properties of) the sQGP, the phase of matter where quarks are not confined into hadrons. Although the existence of the sQGP is now an established fact, new research topics, such as the localization of the precise transition point and of the conjectured Critical End Point (CEP) of the QCD phase diagram, are just as intriguing as was the rush for the sQGP. One special tool in this exploration is provided by the quantum nature of particles, and the resulting quantum statistical correlations. By measuring such correlations in momentum space, one gains access to the femtometer scale spatiotemporal structure of the transition of sQGP to ordinary matter. In this talk we aim to initiate the audience into the secrets of femtoscopy, and how it is connected to the hunting of sharks or the distribution of wealth.
Biography:
Máté Csanád started his university studies at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), and obtained a Physics MSc degree at the Eötvös University (Hungary) in 2004. He pursued his graduate studies at the Stony Brook University (NY, USA) and at the Eötvös University, where he with a PhD in 2007. Interrupted by several semesters spent at CERN and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, he works at the Eötvös University since his PhD, where he also habilitated in 2013. He obtained his DSc degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2021, and is a professor since then. His interests focus on high energy heavy ion physics, hyrodynamic modeling of the quark gluon plasma, quantumstatistical correlations and the femtometer spacetime structure of the quark matter. He leads the Hungarian participation in experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and is member also in CERN experiments. His main research interests include the understanding of spatiotemporal structures on the femtometer scale via femtoscopy, as well as analytical solutions of relativistic hydrodynamic to understand the time evolution of the matter created in collider experiments.
He received a Bolyai Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, twice. He won the New National Excellence Scholarship and obtained several other grants from the National Research, Development and Innovation Office. He received a Fulbright Scholarship, a HAESF Senior Leaders and Scholars Fellowship and was elected as a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe. He was furthermore awarded by the Bolyai Plaque of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Jánossy Lajos prize of Roland Eötvös Physical Society, the Imreh Csanád Prize of the National Council of Student Research Societies, and the Hungarian Order of Merit, Knight’s Cross.
His publications appeared among others in Physical Review Letters, Physical Review C/D, Physics Letters, Nuclear Physics and Nature Physics. He has more than 800 experimental, many-author publications, but also close to a 100 few-author publications. He presented at international conferences close to 100 times. He is also enthusiastic about outreach, and gives talks regularly in high-schools and public science dissemination events.
Website: https://csanad.web.elte.hu/