Hannah Petersen

Visiting Assistant Professor

2009-2010: Feodor Lynen Fellow

hp52@phy.duke.edu

Phone: [+1]  919 660 2496
Office: 261 B
Teaching (Fall 2011)

Research Group: Theoretical Nuclear and Particle Physics

Research: By colliding large nuclei at almost the speed of light strongly interacting matter is heated and compressed to conditions that are very similar to the ones of the early universe, only microseconds after the Big Bang. Experimentally, it is only possible to measure the momenta of the particles that are produced during the collision and fly into the detector. Therefore, effective approaches for the dynamical evolution are necessary to gain theoretical insights about the properties of the hot and dense matter that has been created. I am currently working on a hybrid approach based on transport theory and hydrodynamics to constrain the initial state fluctuations by looking at final state correlation observables as well as an improvement of the final state decoupling description. More about my current research can be found here.

Main topics of interest:

  • Hybrid Transport Models for RHIC/LHC/FAIR
    • Initial State Fluctuations and Triangular Flow
    • Dynamical Description of the Freeze-out Transition
  • UltrarelativisticQuantumMolecularDynamics (UrQMD):
  • Description of Colliding Quark Matter with SU(2) Dynamics


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