Quark Matter 2017 (Chicago)

In an icy cold yet not snow-covered Chicago, a group of seven Rice students, postdocs, and faculty presented exciting results from the STAR and CMS heavy-ion programs at the XXVI international conference on ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, also know as Quark Matter 2017. This conference is considered one of the, if not the, most important conferences in the field. The conference series is typically held on a 18-month schedule. This year more than 700 participants joined from all over the world to listen to the many plenary and parallel sessions, as well as discuss the approximately 400 posters.
IMG_20170211_121826~2IMG_0449
Daniel Brandenburg gave an oral presentation on some recent, exciting results in low-transverse momentum dielectron spectra which appear to show a consistent and significant excess as a function of the (virtual) dielectron mass. He also showed some first preliminary results of a dilepton analysis that involves muons instead of electrons and is based on the output of the MTD detector.

David Tlusty presented a poster on his recent results the measurement of directed flow from proton, Lambda and K0s in fixed-target collisions measured by the STAR detector (which is designed for collider mode, so this is a rather unconventional way of using the detector!).

Frank Geurts presented a posted on the Endcap Time-of-Flight detector, one of the future detector upgrades that STAR together with the CBM Collaboration (in the context of FAIR Phase 0) envision for the upcoming second phase of the RHIC Beam Energy Scan.

The direct links to the presentations are listed below.