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Fri, May 16, 2025


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6:30pm
to
7:30pm
Beautiful Melting: The dissolving of beauty-antibeauty states in the Quark-Gluon Plasma  (Conferences / Seminars / Lectures)

Abstract

From the speaker:

A Quark-Gluon Plasma is the state of matter that existed in the first microseconds of the universe. The temperatures were about a million times hotter than that of our sun. At these extremely hot temperatures, atoms and nuclei melt into a soup of quarks and gluons. We can study this state in modern accelerators by colliding heavy nuclei, such as gold or lead, at ultrarelativistic energies. One way to study this plasma is by studying its effect on particles made of a heavy quark-antiquark pair. The heaviest of these are states made of b and anti-b quarks, sometimes called "beauty" quarks. In this talk, we will summarize measurements taken over the past 15 years, we have studied these particles as they experience the hot environment of the Quark-Gluon Plasma, where we have found that these particles essentially melt when they are placed in this extreme environment.

Bio

Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez is a professor of physics at the University of California Davis (UC Davis). Originally from Mexico City, Mexico, Calderón went to high school and college at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, majoring in engineering physics. Thanks to a fellowship from the Mexican Physical Society, Calderón conducted summer research at CERN and moved on to graduate school, joining the relativistic heavy-ion group at Yale University, where he completed his PhD in 2001 in the field of high-energy nuclear physics. His work was done at the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was first a postdoc and then a staff scientist.

Calderón's desire to teach led him to look for university positions, and he was hired as an assistant professor at Indiana University in 2004, and then at UC Davis in 2006, where he is a full professor. He is also the featured scientist and narrator of the IMAX film, "Secrets of the Universe."

An enthusiastic educator, Calderón was a recipient of the UC Davis Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 2013. He is also a member of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee and continues to do research at Brookhaven National Laboratory as well as CERN in the Large Hadron Collider, focusing on b-quark bound states and Z bosons.

Zoom Link: https://msu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NlH0C1tqSmCy8mVEZV6dKw

more information...


Location: Facility for Rare Isotope Beams [map]
Price: free
Sponsor: public
Contact: Bob Patterer
email pic events@frib.msu.edu