When: Jan 28, 2026
Speaker: Laura Havener, Yale University
Title: Looking Inside Jets to Explore the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract: The fundamental building blocks of matter, quarks and gluons, are normally  confined inside protons and neutrons. Under extreme conditions of high temperature and energy density, these partons become deconfined and form a novel state of matter known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Such conditions are created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and RHIC. Although the QGP has been shown to behave as a nearly perfect fluid, its intrinsic properties remain elusive. Jets, which are collimated sprays of particles produced by high-momentum quarks and gluons, provide a powerful probe of the QGP. As jets traverse the medium, they interact with it, losing energy and undergoing modifications to their internal structure, a phenomenon known as jet quenching. Jet substructure observables exploit patterns inside jets to provide a more detailed view of how these interactions modify the jet as it propagates through the medium.
In this seminar, I will discuss recent jet substructure measurements and what they reveal about the properties of the QGP. I will highlight how modern jet substructure techniques enable more differential studies of jet quenching and discuss ongoing efforts to connect these measurements to theoretical descriptions of jet-medium interactions.

Bio: Laura Havener is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics from Columbia University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University before joining as faculty. Her research focuses on experimental studies of the strong interaction at high-energy particle colliders, with an emphasis on jets and jet substructure as probes of the quark-gluon plasma. She is a member of the ALICE, STAR, and ePIC collaborations. Within ALICE, she previously served as a convener of the Jets and Hard Photons Physics Working Group and currently serves on the Editorial Board. In addition to physics analysis, she is involved in detector R&D for the future Electron-Ion Collider, with a focus on RICH particle-identification detectors.