Speaker
Description
A wealth of experimental results from the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the CERN Large Hadron Collider indicates that the final states of high-energy nuclear collisions encode detailed information about the spatial distributions and correlations of nucleons in the ground states of the colliding nuclei. The prospect of imaging these quantum many-body states arises naturally from the unique kinematics of such reactions: ultra-fast QCD interactions effectively provide billions of snapshots of the nuclear wave function, whose long-range features leave a pronounced imprint on the subsequent hydrodynamic evolution of the quark–gluon plasma.
While these observations have traditionally been interpreted within classical frameworks based on nuclear shapes, a paradigm shift is underway. The relevant observables are being understood in terms of novel many-body operators in quantum mechanics, whose expectation values can be accessed experimentally through multi-particle correlation measurements. In this way, high-energy nuclear collisions offer a unique laboratory for probing and characterizing many-body correlations of nucleons directly in the ground state of nuclei. I will outline the progress made along these lines and how this emerging perspective may influence nuclear physics research more broadly.
