Michael Winn

Background

About Michael Winn

My research area lies within quark-gluon plasma and hadron physics. In particular, I am interested in the structure of hadrons and nuclei at high energy, the initial state of heavy-ion collisions, and in the relaxation of this initial state towards an equilibrium Quark-Gluon Plasma and the properties of the latter. My activites cover experimental analyses, feasibility studies, detector and physics simulations, analysis software development and detector integration work. They are embedded in large experimental collaborations, ALICE and LHCb. I contributed to key measurements on quarkonium and heavy-flavour production in proton-nucleus, nucleus-nucleus and in ultra-peripheral collisions. Furthermore, I am working on modeling, phenomenology and theory: interpretation of heavy-flavour and jet physics results in heavy-ion collisions, connection between different objects characterizing the wave-function of hadrons, definition of new observables for the thermalisation process in heavy-ion collisions, thermal model for the description of the hadronic final state in heavy-ion collisions. I am also active on the long-term planning of the field of heavy-ion physics at colliders. My research is driven by the following questions- Do become hadron wave functions at high-energy a dense self-interacting system of gluons or do they stay a dilute collection of gluons?(quest for gluon saturation, structure prior to collision)- Under which conditions and how fast does the initial collapse of the colliding hadronic wave-functions relax into a hydrodynamic description?(quest for thermalisation, initial stages of collision)- At which time in heavy-ion collisions and at which temperature are uncoloured bound states as hadrons created and survive?(quest for deconfinement, quark-gluon plasma characteristics)- How does the transition between a fluid description and free streaming hadrons work in hadronic collisions on a microscopic scale?(quest for hadronisation, transition at the end of the collision)