Our most recent PhD graduate
André Cordeiro successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Jetography in Heavy Ion Collisions”
On 25 September 2026, André Cordeiro successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Jetography in Heavy Ion Collisions”, at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, and was awarded Pass with Distinction.
The thesis was supervised by Liliana Apolinário (LIP/Instituto Superior Técnico), with Néstor Armesto (IGFAE/University of Santiago de Compostela) and José Guilherme Milhano (LIP/Instituto Superior Técnico) as co-supervisors.
André’s work addresses a central challenge in the study of heavy-ion collisions: understanding how the internal evolution of high-energy jets is modified through their interaction with the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), and how these modifications can be used to probe the properties and space-time evolution of the medium.
The first part of the thesis focused on medium-induced QCD radiation, developing new numerical methods to describe how radiation from a pair of partons is modified through multiple interactions with the QGP. This allowed André to go beyond commonly used approximations and explore more realistic descriptions of parton–QGP interactions.
A second major component explored the space-time evolution of QCD jets. André showed that different descriptions of the parton shower, while leading to equivalent jet configurations in proton–proton collisions, correspond to different space-time histories. In heavy-ion collisions, these differences have physical consequences, as they change how the developing jet interacts with the QGP. The medium thus provides a unique environment in which the otherwise hidden space-time structure of a QCD jet can have observable consequences.
The jury was chaired by João Paulo Ferreira da Silva (Instituto Superior Técnico) and included Maria Teresa Haderer de la Peña Stadler (Instituto Superior Técnico), Magdalena Djordjevic (Institute of Physics Belgrade/University of Belgrade), Andrey Sadofyev (EHU/University of the Basque Country), and Liliana Apolinário (LIP/Instituto Superior Técnico). Magdalena Djordjevic and Andrey Sadofyev served as external reviewers.
Following the completion of his PhD, André will continue his research career as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Centre for Nuclear Research (NCBJ) in Poland, starting in October 2026.
Congratulations, André!