LNS Lunchtime Seminar

Yi Chen

Rigorous parameter extraction in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract:
In the past couple of decades, there has been a lot of progress and excitement in studying ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions and the test of QCD under extreme conditions. Due to the complex nature of the system, there are numerous moving pieces in modeling heavy-ion collisions and many parameters to pin down. It is a challenge with ever-increasing importance that we utilize the experimental results correctly and the best way we can, with the proliferation of high precision data at RHIC and LHC. There have been many efforts in the past years utilizing the Bayesian analysis to achieve this goal and extract physics parameters in the context of different models. The Bayesian formalism provides a rigorous way to perform data-model comparisons. It also lends itself to many potential applications beyond parameter extraction. In this talk, I will discuss some of the work done so far and what the possibilities are moving forward with the Bayesian analyses.