Olga Evdokimov

Research

    I have been involved in High Energy Nuclear Physics research for over ten years. Most of this time I  was primarily  involved with the experimental program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), studying possible formation and properties of Quark Gluon Plasma with the STAR (Solenoid Tracker at RHIC) detector. 

My recent research efforts covered quite wide range of subjects. My interests include investigating the collision dynamics, hadronization mechanisms, statistical jet reconstruction and jet-medium interactions.

Scientifically, my physics interests can be summarized by the following topics:

• Studies of the freeze-out properties at RHIC energies. This work is focused on understanding the bulk matter properties via identified particle studies in the soft sector. The multi-species spectra is analyzed within the frameworks of statistical and hydro-dynamically motivated blast-wave models to infer the system properties at chemical and kinetic freeze-outs. 

• Advanced particle identification technique to extend the identification of charged pions, protons and antiprotons identification  to high transverse momenta (~12 GeV/c) with the STAR Time-Projection Chamber (TPC) detector. Such extension of identified hadron measurements opens new ways to explore the color-charge dependencies of the partonic energy loss in the QCD medium. 

• Developments of 2- and 3-particle correlation analysis, including identified angular correlations of charged hadrons with high p_T triggers. The study focuses on differences of relative baryon-to-meson production in the jets and long range pseudo-rapidity correlation accompanying them.

• Di-jet studies in the heavy ion collisions to explore the jet production and jet-medium interaction mechanisms at RHIC energies. The technique, developed at UIC for these studies (“2+1 correlations”) involves studying particle production associated with pairs of back-to-back correlated hadron triggers.  

    The main physics goals of my future research plan are to study flavor dependencies of energy loss and possible modifications of parton fragmentation functions via identified particle studies in correlations; to qualitatively address the details and the mechanisms of the energy loss in the medium via new multi-hadron correlation techniques. In the longer term I anticipate to continue the study of heavy ion collision properties at both LHC (CMS experiment) and RHIC. In CMS I plan to primarily focus on jet studies via angular correlations, with an emphasis on possible modifications of parton fragmentation functions.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Posted by Olga on May 01, 2012