Time & Place: Oct. 31, Thursday, 10:00am, Room 9409
   
Speaker:  Prof. Jürgen Schukraft , CERN, Former ALICE    spokesperson (2001-2010)
   
Title: "Heavy Ion Physics with protons ?  What can we learn from    small systems (pp, pA)"
   
Abstract:
One of the biggest surprises at the CERN LHC collider was the discovery that the small, relatively low multiplicity systems   created in proton-proton and proton lead collisions exhibit a number of phenomena usually associated with heavy ion collisions and the   Quark Gluon Plasma. Amongst these phenomena are collective multiparticle correlations usually associated with hydrodynamic   flow, enhanced production of strange particles often interpreted as a sign of deconfined parton matter, and even quarkonium suppression (Psi') indicative of strong final state interactions. The talk will summarize some of the most relevant experimental facts and try to give a personal view of why these results are extremely interesting and important for heavy ion physics and what we may eventually be able to learn from them.
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Jürgen Schukraft is a senior researcher at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. He received his PhD in 1983 from the University of Heidelberg, investigating fission processes in Uranium on Uranium collisions at the heavy ion accelerator at GSI, Darmstadt. He joined CERN as a fellow in 1984 working on hadron production and electromagnetic  signals in experiments using both pp reactions (R808 at the CERN ISR) and heavy ion reactions (NA34, NA45 at the CERN SPS and E855 at the BNL AGS accelerators). He is a founding member of the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC and served as its first Spokesperson from 1991 to 2010. The ALICE collaboration, including more than 1500 scientists from over 170 Institutions, is dedicated to the study of matter at extreme energy densities (the ‘Quark Gluon Plasma’), which resembles the primordial matter in the early Universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang. He served as member or chair of several working groups set up by international science committees (NuPECC, NSAC, OECD-Megascience, ECFA), is or was member of a number of scientific councils an committees (IPN Orsay, NIKHEF, BNL RHIC PAC, US NSAC, NBI Copenhagen), evaluates grants for national and European research agencies (USA, France, Italy, Poland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Israel), and is Associate  Editor of a physics journal (EPJC). In 2014 he received the Lise Meitner prize for Nuclear Science of the European Physical Society  and in 2017 the Niels Bohr Medal of Honour from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, DK.