Title: RHIC-STAR Heavy Flavor Production 

Speaker: Dr. ZHANG Shenghui (University of Science and Technology of China)  

Time: 15:00 pm, February 16 (Thursday), 2023 

Place: Room 218, Building 5 

Abstract:  

Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions provide a unique opportunity for studying Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) under controlled conditions in laboratories. The force that binds quarks together in nucleons can be screened at sufficiently high energy density, leading to a transition from ordinary nuclear matter to a new phase called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), whose properties are governed by partonic degrees of freedom. Experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have provided strong evidence that a strongly-interacting QGP is created in collisions of heavy ions at RHIC and the LHC. Owing to their large masses, heavy quarks, including charm (c) and beauty (b) quarks, are produced predominantly via hard partonic scatterings at the early stage of a heavy-ion collision, and the thermal production in the QGP is negligible. They subsequently probe the entire evolution of the system created in the collision, including the partonic phase of the QGP, hadronization and the hadronic phase. Thus, heavy quark can serve as an excellent probe for studying the properties of the QGP. In this talk, I will present the measurements of electrons from semileptonic decays of open heavy flavor hadrons in p+p and Au+Au collisions at √s_NN = 200 GeV with the STAR detector. I will also present the measurements of sequential Υ suppression in Au+Au collisions at √s_NN = 200 GeV.  

About the speaker: 

Dr. ZHANG Shenghui is a research associate in Department of Modern Physics at University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei. She received her Ph.D. in high energy nuclear physics from University of Science and Technology of China in 2018. Then she joined the group for High Energy Physics at University of Illinois at Chicago, as a postdoctoral Research Associate, from 2020 to 2022. Based on data collected by the STAR Collaboration, her research focus is on the heavy flavor production. She also played a leading role in the testing of STAR Forward Silicon Tracker (FST) production modules at Fermilab Silicon Detector Facility and in the development of FST offline software.