New ALICE Physics Convener

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Congratulations to Jaime Norman for becoming a new Physics convener of the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC (CERN). Starting from November 2021 Jaime co-chairs the Physics Analysis Group focusing on jets and hard photons measurements (e.g. jet spectra, isolated photons, gamma-jet, hadron-jet…).

Since his PhD in the Liverpool ALICE group, Jaime has played a leading role in new measurements of heavy-flavour production in proton-proton, proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC. Notably he has performed first measurements with ALICE of the production of the Λc (udc) charmed baryon, which is sensitive to perturbative and non-perturbative aspects of Quantum Chromodynamics, including the hadronisation of charm quarks (J. High Energy Phys. 04 (2018) 108, Phys.Lett. B793 (2019) 212-223, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127 (2021) 202301).  

More recently, returning to Liverpool from LPSC Grenoble (France) where he worked as a postdoc for two years, he has initiated a new research programme of jet measurements which aim to probe fundamental transport properties of hot QCD matter and reveal the short distance structure of the quark gluon plasma through, for instance, measurements of the yield and acoplanarity of jets recoiling from a high pT hadron.

Data taking at the LHC is due to restart in 2022. Alongside his new role as physics convener Jaime intends to keep developing his research programme, taking advantage of the new opportunities offered by the upgraded ALICE experiment (e.g. the new Inner Tracking System which Liverpool contributed to build in the last few years). He is planning first high-precision measurements, which correlate the production of heavy-flavour hadrons (with charm or beauty) and jets in lead-lead collisions. As heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies give rise to a challenging high-density environment, Jaime also develops and uses novel machine learning techniques to perform these complex data analyses.

This research programme is open to prospective PhD students. Please contact Prof Marielle Chartier (m.chartier@liverpool.ac.uk) or Dr Jaime Norman (jaime.norman@cern.ch) for further information.