MSCA Grant

My research was fully supported by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships,  H2020-MSCA-IF-2020, grant HPOFHIC – 10103 (20212023) from April 2021 to March 2023. The list of activities worked out during the project is listed below.

Scientific output 

The project tried to help understand the behavior of our nature at the most fundamental level. The obtained results improve our understanding of the matter that is believed to have existed during the first microseconds after the Big Bang or in the cores of neutron stars. Heavy ion collisions are currently the only way to create and study such extreme conditions on Earth. Secondly, the project results should help us understand the process of how heavy particles, like protons and neutrons, are formed from quarks, which are the most fundamental building blocks of matter we know.

More specifically, this project aimed to improve our understanding of properties and states of matter at extremely high temperatures and pressures that existed shortly after the Big Bang. Such conditions can be created by collisions of two heavy nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies. The project also tries to improve our knowledge of one of the four fundamental forces in nature, the strong interaction. This is done by measurement of hard processes like jets, collimated sprays of particles that are born in collisions and penetrate the hot and dense plasma.

The project resulted in the following publications:

  1. ATLAS Collaboration, Measurements of the suppression and correlations of dijets in Xe+Xe collisions at 5.44 TeV, Submitted to Physical Review C, arXiv:2302.03967 [nucl-ex]
  2. ATLAS Collaboration, Measurement of suppression of large-radius jets and its dependence on substructure in Pb+Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector, Submitted to Physical Review Letters, arXiv:2301.05606 [nucl-ex]
  3. ATLAS Collaboration, Measurement of the nuclear modification factor of b-jets in 5.02 TeV Pb+Pb collisions with the ATLAS detector, Eur. Phys. J. C (2023) 83:438, arXiv:2204.13530 [nucl-ex]
  4. Two more publications are expected to be submitted this year

The result of this project provides a new perspective for understanding the role of jet structure, jet mass, jet flavor, and path length in jet suppression in the hot and dense medium, quark-gluon plasma. This can be further used by theorists in constraining plasma properties as we ll as improve our understanding of the strong force.

The grant also supported me in the position of leader of the heavy ion (HI) physics group at the ATLAS collaboration.  As the leader of the HI group at the ATLAS experiment, the researcher was responsible for the coordination of a group of approximately 70 physicists from various institutes across the globe, working on various aspects of heavy-ion physics, starting from physics of hard processes (jets, charmonia, vector bosons), through physics of correlations and fluctuations, and ending by physics of ultra-peripheral collisions (recent measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of tau lepton). This work involved overseeing and coordinating 28 different analyses leading to 15 papers submitted/accepted to/by peer review journals. Furthermore, the researcher was responsible for planning the future HI physics program and for the preparation of upcoming data taking.

Talks at international conferences and workshops

I was invited to give the following talk during the project:

  1. March 2023, Jet quenching studies with new jet substructure and suppression measurements in ATLAS, Hard Probes 2023
  2. June 2022, Heavy Ion Working Group Report, ATLAS collaboration week, Geneve, Switzerland
  3. June 2022, Experimental results on intra-jet softening and large-angle energy flow, conference: ECT* Jet quenching workshop
  4. May 2022, Jet substructure in heavy ions (experiment), conference: LHCP 2022
  5. April 2022, Experimental overview on jet substructure and medium response (EX), conference: Quark Matter 2022
  6. June 2021, Hard probes of heavy ion collisions with ATLAS, conference: ISMD2021
  7. October 2021, Probing QCD matter with Jets, seminar at AGH Krakow
  8. September 2021, Jets in Heavy Ion collisions, Hadronic Calibration Workshop
  9. Organization a virtual HI trigger workshop,  June 2021

Outreach activities

Organization or participation in about 27 outreach events.

  • The main organizer of “The Big Bang Stage” at the Colours of Ostrava festival in the summer of 2022. The program at the stage was attended by 3000 people over four days. 
  • Lectures on “How to make matter from light” on cosmology, and experiments with particle detection at the Summer School of Astronomy in 2021 and 2022.
  • Public lectures on various topics from physics of elementary particles at SCIENCE Meetup in Paralelní Polis (September 2021), Patecnici (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASV3jbPnfHg&t=168s, July 2022), Mensa meeting for  talented kids (June 2022), Ostrava observatory (October 2021),  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWjkqKVFVOo&t=1s), festival Technology in Society (November 2022), festival WOMAD (July 2022), Physics olympiad and others
  • Experiment with cloud chambers particle detector for high school students in September 2021
  • Lectures about particle physics as part of the Science to Go project in Blansko and Prague (October 2021, February 2022)
  • Participation in Science is wonderful in 2021 (three lectures)
  • Two podcasts: “Sedmikrasky” by Observatory in Brno (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyxTgQAnoKA&t=1848s) and X-challenge podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_rswAO7xnI&t=1626s)
  • Talk about extreme states of matter for high school students in Litomerice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRR1djV447E&t=404s)
  • Moderating CERN Masterclasses for high school students (three events in 2021 and three in 2022)