Priyanka Roy Chowdhury
supervisor: Daniel Kikola
My field of research is experimental high energy particle physics and I am working in a project within the STAR experiment under supervision of Prof. Daniel Kikola. This experiment is located at RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider), BNL, USA. STAR consists of different type of detectors and each of them are designated to study different particles and their motion. We are particularly interested on the study of the Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP) state of matter which is an extremely dense and hot state of matter created in the universe just after the Big Bang. To study that, we will analyze the particles comprise of charm quarks (heavy quarks) and light qurks and by studying the behavior of the charm quarks in a soup of light quarks (u and d) we can measure diffusion coefficient of the quark-gluon plasma. We will study the details of the charm quark-light quark interactions via correlations at low relative momentum between charm and light quark.
So far, I have gone through literature review about the experiment and done some tasks on how to deal with the data for analysis. I have used CERN ROOT toolkit and picoDST toolkit for calculating mass, momentum, transverse momentum, rapidity, pseudo rapidity of different particles and making histograms for those.