Research Seminar

September 13, 2023

Location: SB 156

Time: 12:00 pm

Presenter: Dr. Ejiro Umaka

Probing the quark-gluon plasma with the sPHENIX detector

Abstract: sPHENIX is a new RHIC detector designed for high precision measurement of jets and heavy flavor probes of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). sPHENIX is equipped with a suite of tracking detectors for vertexing, timing, and momentum measurement; calorimeters for photon, electron, hadron and jet measurements; and event characterization detectors for centrality and event plane measurements. sPHENIX’s first data began in late May 2023 primarily to commission the detector. Several physics observables including and not limited to jet correlations, jet substructure, open heavy flavor and upsilons are planned measurements with this year’s data and with data in the upcoming run in 2024.
This talk will discuss probes of the QGP and sPHENIX readiness for these measurements.

Ejiro Umaka did her PhD work on ALICE at the LHC at CERN, which was granted to her in 2020 by the University of the Houston. She studied the QCD crossover temperature via net-particle fluctuation measurements in Pb-Pb collisions. She joined the sPHENIX collaboration at RHIC and the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC in 2020 studying jets and event plane dependent observables while she was a postdoctoral associate at Iowa State University. In 2022, she joined Brookhaven National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher where she continues to work on jet and flow related observables in sPHENIX. She is currently serving as sPHENIX juniors’ committee co-chair, software coordinator for sPHENIX event plane detector; and she is an avid yoga practitioner.

Light lunch will be provided.