Unveiling the hottest secrets of the Universe

What if we could peer back in time to the first moments after the Big Bang? In those early microseconds, the universe was a searing-hot ocean of fundamental particles—a state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), where quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, roamed freely.

Today, physicists recreate this primordial matter in laboratories by colliding the nuclei of heavy atoms at nearly the speed of light in experiments like those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These collisions briefly produce the extreme temperatures and densities of the early universe, offering a window into its earliest history.

But how do we study something so fleeting and exotic? We use high-energy particle showers—jets of quarks and gluons—as probes. As these jets travel through the QGP, they lose energy, scatter, and split into cascades of particles, revealing clues about the plasma's properties. In this talk, we’ll explore how these jets evolve within the QGP and examine the subtle role of quantum coherence effects—how different stages of the particle shower can overlap and interfere with each other.

Join me as we journey from the birth of the universe to cutting-edge experiments in modern physics, uncovering the hottest secrets of matter in its most extreme form.