Quark-Gluon Plasma: From Melting Quarks to Boiling Hadrons – Kuwait Foundation for Advancement of Science (KFAS) Grant Proposal

Dr. Mushtaq Loan

Funded By: - Kuwait Foundation for Advancement of Science (KFAS)

Summary: - Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is a journey into new phases of strong interactions that helps physicists understand times between approximately 10-12 and 10-5 seconds after the Big Bang. At very high temperatures hadrons melt, and their constituents form a new phase of matter, the so-called QGP. The deconfinement phase transition from hadronic matter to quark-gluon matter takes place at a temperature that is 100thousand times hotter than the interior of the sun. Such conditions did exist in the early universe a few microseconds after the big bang and can be created in heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies as provided by the accelerators RHIC at Brookhaven, and LHC at CERN. The over-arching goal of my research is to extract accurate signals for the formation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and to explore why and when the hadrons can dissolve liberating the quarks and gluons, and to achieve a predictive understanding of this new physics.

A complete list of Dr. Mushtaq's publications can be found on arXiv.org and Inspire HEP.