Carlo Heissenberg graduated with flying colors in 2019 from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, the Italian twin sister of the Ecole Normale de Paris. His initial research focused on the infrared properties of gravitational theories and higher spin theories from the perspective of asymptotic symmetries, a topic that later found phenomenological applications in the context of gravitational wave studies.
It was during his first postdoctoral period at Nordita-Uppsala (2019-2023) that Carlo started working on gravitational wave physics using ideas borrowed from particle physics, such as scattering amplitudes and eikonal exponentiation in particular. He quickly became a leader in the field, publishing several important papers with world-famous physicists such as Gabriele Veneziano. Carlo's group achieved, for instance, the first complete calculation of the gravitational deflection angle to the third post-Minkowskian order in the Newton coupling constant expansion, while simultaneously resolving the high-energy limit problem that was puzzling the community.
In the meantime, Carlo was granted a Marie-Curie fellowship and moved to his second postdoc at Queen Mary, while continuing to work on gravitational wave physics, focusing on new observables (waveforms, angular momentum loss, effect of spins…) that could be calculated efficiently using scattering amplitudes techniques.
Carlo accepted an offer from the IPhT and will join the lab as a permanent member in Fall 2024.
Collisions between nuclei of lead atoms are carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to study the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter where neutrons and protons are dissociated into their elementary constituents, quarks and gluons. Its temperature at the LHC has been measured to be (2.540+-0.090) trillion Kelvin [1], [3]. Another important thermodynamic property is the compressibility, which is related to the speed of sound through standard thermodynamic identities.
Back in 2019, Fernando Gardim (a physicist from Brazil who was on sabbatical leave at IPhT), Giuliano Giacalone (PhD student at IPhT) and Jean-Yves Ollitrault (IPhT) proposed to extract the speed of sound from LHC data by analyzing "ultracentral" collisions, defined as collisions at zero impact parameter [2]. The number of particles in ultracentral collisions can vary by 10-15%, corresponding to a variation of density, which can be used to probe the compressibility. They predicted that the momentum per particle, which is proportional to the temperature, should increase as a function of the multiplicity, and that the relative change would provide a direct measure of the speed of sound.
This prediction [2] has motivated a dedicated analysis by the CMS collaboration at the LHC [3]. CMS has recently observed the predicted increase of the momentum per particle and extracted a precise measure of the speed of sound, (49.1 +- 1.6)% of the speed of light, in perfect agreement with first-principles calculations from the theory of strong interactions, QCD.
[1] "Thermodynamics of hot strong-interaction matter from ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions", Fernando G. Gardim, Giuliano Giacalone, Matthew Luzum, and Jean-Yves Ollitrault. Nature Physics Letters 16 (2020) 615-619, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0846-4
Voir aussi : https://www.ipht.fr/Phocea/Vie_des_labos/News/index.php?id_news=1032
[2] "Measuring the speed of sound of the quark-gluon plasma in ultracentral nucleus-nucleus collisions", Fernando G. Gardim, Giuliano Giacalone, Jean-Yves Ollitrault https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11609v1. Physics Letters B 809 (2020) 135749 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135749
[3] "Extracting the speed of sound in the strongly interacting matter created in ultrarelativistic lead-lead collisions at the LHC", CMS Collaboration, https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.06896. Submitted to Reports on Progress in Physics.
Two IPhT researchers feature in the latest issue of "Sciences et Avenir- La recherche" (925, March 2024).
Kirone Mallick was interviewed as part of the article "Maison Poincaré - Les mathématiques en partage" marking the opening of the new Maison Poincaré at the Institut Henri Poincaré. Clémentine Laurens interviewed Kirone, a mathematician, and a biologist. Among other topics, Kirone explains the relationship between physics and mathematics.
Francis Bernardeau, Deputy Director of the Euclid consortium, was interviewed as an expert cosmologist for a special report on Dark Energy (by Fabrice Nicot and Sylvie Rouat) in the same journal issue. In his intervention, Francis gives the general public an overview of the various theoretical models that describe the nature of dark energy, which accounts for around 68% of the energy in the known universe.
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