Studies of Jet-track Correlations in Pb-Pb Collisions With CMS
Dragos Velicanu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In ultra-relativistic lead-on-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider a new state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma is formed and exists for about 10<sup>-23</sup> seconds in a volume around the size of a nucleus before cooling down into normal matter. High-momentum probes sometimes arise naturally in these collisions in the form of back-to-back particles, detected as jets in our detector, and make it possible to study this state of matter on very short length and time scales. By looking at correlations of particles from a collision to these jets, one can study the effect the quark-gluon plasma has on the jets by carefully comparing to similar correlations created from proton-proton collisions, where similarly created jets pass through the vacuum instead of through the quark-gluon plasma. The results of this study are presented in this poster.
Abstract Author(s): Dragos Velicanu