Construction of an ab-initio Monte Carlo model for heavy ion collisions

• Applicant: Dr. Korinna Zapp
• Subject Area: Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
• Term: from 2012 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 212080039

The goal of this project is the construction of a simulation program for a complete description of nuclear collisions at the energy frontier, as they are presently investigated at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As far as possible, the simulation will be based on first principles. The program will build on and substantially extent the already validated event generator Sherpa, which is being successfully used by the CERN experimenters to describe the proton-proton collisions that are also studied there. To correctly describe the transition from dynamics on the basis of elementary particles, as in proton-proton reactions, to the collective behaviour, that is typical for nuclear reactions, a Poincare-invariant formulation of the full kinematics of the reaction must be found. This will allow to employ perturbative methods for the description of the dynamics at large energy scales in parallel with thermodynamic ideas to describe the emerging hot and dense strongly interacting system on the same kinematic footing. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that important characteristics of relativistic nuclear collisions can be explained by perturbative methods. In order to obtain a more complete picture the perturbative interactions can be supplemented with testable and predictive models for the description of soft interactions at a later stage. The development and full deployment of such a simulation model has far-reaching applications, for instance in the description of high-energy cosmic rays. Furthermore and even more importantly, such a model would allow to quantitatively assess and test our ideas on how collective behaviour emerges from microscopic quantities.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Valentin Khoze