Exploring the extremes of nuclear matter with strangeness fluctuations in ALICE at the LHC

In ultrarelativistic collisions of lead nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the temperature and energy density are so high that matter melts into its fundamental parts, quarks and gluons.

Known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), this exotic state of matter occupies the extreme high-temperature and high-density regime of the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

By probing the properties of the QGP, we are able to study directly how quarks and gluons, and the strong nuclear interaction between them, behave in the extreme high-temperature limit.

Fluctuations in the net number of particles produced in heavy-ion collisions are some of the only experimentally-measurable quantities that can be directly related to fundamental properties of the QGP which are calculable in QCD, without relying on complex and approximate phenomenological modeling.

Fluctuations are also signatures of the presence of the phase transition, and can therefore illuminate the phase structure of QCD.

In this project, I describe a physics program for measuring net-strange-quark fluctuations with data from the ALICE experiment at the LHC by means of a recently-developed analytical technique.

Such a program builds on my experience and previous work at CERN and Heidelberg University, and takes advantage of the expertise present in the ALICE and QCD theory groups at Lund University. This research program will be unique at the LHC and opens up a new area of fundamental QCD research in Sweden.