Related papers: Heavy quark studies with nuclear emulsions
In 1956 Reines & Cowan discovered the neutrino using a liquid scintillator detector. The neutrinos interacted with the scintillator, producing light that propagated across transparent volumes to surrounding photo-sensors. This approach has…
The formation of hadrons is a fundamental process in nature that can be investigated at particle colliders. As several recent findings demonstrate, with $\mathrm{e^+e^-}$ collisions as a "vacuum-like" reference at one extreme, and central…
Quarkonia and open heavy flavour production are crucial to study the properties of the nuclear matter at high energy densities and of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). In proton-proton collisions at LHC, the measurement of their production…
Despite numerous achievements and recent progress, nuclear physics is often (wrongly) considered an old field of research nowadays. However, developments in theoretical frameworks and reliable experimental techniques have made the field…
Matter in its present form was formed when our Universe emerged from the quark-gluon phase (QGP) at about 30mus into its evolution. To explore this early period in the laboratory, we study highly excited matter formed in relativistic heavy…
The first collisions of lead nuclei, delivered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the end of 2010, at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV, marked the beginning of a new era in ultra-relativistic…
A model for the pionic components of nuclear wave functions is obtained from light front dynamical calculations of binding energies and densities. The pionic effects are small enough to be consistent with measured nuclear di-muon production…
Among the few ways that allow or could allow us to probe the early Universe from the observation of a flux of primordial particles, there is one possibility which has been little studied: the observation today of high energy neutrinos which…
Heavy-quark production provides a sensitive probe of the gluon structure of nucleons and its modication in nuclei. It is also a key probe of the hot-dense matter created in heavy-ion collisions. We will discuss the physics issues involved,…
Early November 2010, the LHC collided for the first time heavy ions, Pb on Pb, at a centre-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV/nucleon. This date marked both the end of almost 20 years of preparing for nuclear collisions at the LHC, as well as the…
The RHIC program was intended to identify and study the quark-gluon plasma formed in the collision of heavy nuclei. The discovery of the "perfect liquid" is an essential step towards the understanding of the medium formed in these…
In the last 50 years we have seen how an initially ad-hoc and not widely accepted theory of the strong and electroweak interactions (Standard Theory: ST) has correctly predicted the entire accelerator based experimental observations with…
Heavy-ion collisions provide a window into the properties of many-body systems of deconfined quarks and gluons. Understanding the collective properties of quarks and gluons is possible by comparing models of heavy-ion collisions to…
The multi-TeV energies available at LHC have opened up the possibility to measure, for the first time, various large-mass elementary particles in nuclear collisions. The current study presents the first observation of top quark--the…
The discovery of atomic nucleus by E. Rutherford, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the Nuclear Physics original landmark. From then, a series of experiments in which beams of particles composed of neutrons, protons and others,…
This is a historical account from my personal perspective of the development over the last few decades of the standard model of particle physics. The model is based on gauge theories, of which the first was quantum electrodynamics,…
Hadrons carrying heavy quarks, i.e. charm or bottom, are important probes of the hot and dense medium created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. Heavy quark-antiquark pairs are mainly produced in initial hard scattering processes of…
Muons are a fascinating probe to study nuclear properties. Muonic atoms can easily be formed by stopping negative muons inside a material. The muon is subsequently captured by the nucleus and, due to its much higher mass compared to the…
The past fifty years have seen the emergence of a new field of research in physics, the study of matter at extreme temperatures and densities. The theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), predicts that in this limit,…
Heavy quarks, i.e. charm and beauty, are sensitive probes of the medium produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. They are produced in the early stage of the collisions and are expected to experience the whole collision evolution…