ERC Advanced Grant YoctoLHC
"The European Research Council awarded an Advanced Grant to the project Yoctosecond imaging of QCD collectivity using jet observables, led by Carlos Salgado (Univ Santiago de Compostela/IGFAE) and to be developed by a international team including researchers from LIP and Univ Jyväskylä (Finland)"
Light takes three yoctoseconds to cross a proton. To have an idea of how small this time is we can think that if the age of the universe was just a second, this time would still be one million times shorter than a blink of an eye. This tiny time is apparently enough for, in heavy ion collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), quarks and gluon to lose quantum coherence, interact among themselves and form the quark gluon plasma that permeated the entire universe microseconds after the Big Bang.
The project awarded an 2.5 million euro Advanced Grant for a 5-year period by the European Research Council (ERC), will study the fundamental aspects of the formation of this primordial plasma em particular accelerators. The project, entitled ‘Yoctosecond imaging of QCD collectivity using jet observables’ (YoctoLHC), is led by Carlos Salgado, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and director of the Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Energías (IGFAE), and will be carried out by an international team with researchers from Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas de Lisboa (LIP) and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland.
Two decades of intense experimental study have identified many of the plasma properties: its viscosity is lower than that of any known material (it is the most perfect liquid ever observed) and its temperature is a hundred times higher than the Sun’s core. In spite of such significant advances, the mechanism that allows the creation of this state of matter from the fundamental constituents of protons and neutrons in a very short time remains elusive. The YoctoLHC project proposes a novel use of specific probes, highly energetic particle jets, to build a time image of the first 10 yoctoseconds of the collision and unravel the process of emergence of complexity from the elementary building blocks of Nature.
LIP’s team, Guilherme Milhano e Liliana Apolinario, will be substantially strengthened with this funding. The teamwill be responsible for the development of innovative techniques to identify jet properties sensitive to the early times of a collision.