Dr. Michael Murray
University of Kansas
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
4:30 p.m.
Cardwell 102
The CMS experiment was designed to search for new particles, such as the Higgs Boson, strings or dark matter candidates. However it is also a superb detector to investigate a new state of matter, the Quark Gluon Plasma or QGP, created in heavy ion collisions. I will review some of the basic properties of the plasma and show how CMS gives us new penetrating probes to study it. In particular I would like to focus on the difference between the electro-weak probes and colored objects such as light or heavy quarks lose energy in the plasma and how we might try to measure its temperature. Finally I will speculate how CMS may be the ideal experiment to study another conjectured state of matter, the Colored Glass Condensate, using lead-lead and proton-lead collisions.