Abstract :

The fundamental constituents of visible matter are quarks, gluons and leptons. The quarks and gluons are not found to exist in a free state in nature. They are confined inside particles known as hadrons. However they were in a free state in the micro-second old Universe. We will discuss the formation of such a primordial matter in the laboratory and its properties. This will lead us to address the question of what the phase diagram of the strong interaction (one of the four basic interactions that occur in nature) looks like. We will discuss the recent advances made towards understanding the phase diagram of strong interactions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Bedangadas Mohanty is an experimental high energy physicist specialising in heavy-ion collision experiments that study the quark-gluon plasma. He is currently a Professor at the School of Physical Sciences, National Institute of Science Education Research, Bhubaneswar. Prof. Mohanty received his PhD from IoP, Bhubaneswar in 2002 for work conducted with the WA98 experiment at CERN. He then worked on the STAR and ALICE experiments with the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, US and VECC, Kolkata, before joining IoP in 2012. He has held many leadership positions within these experiments including being deputy spokesperson of the STAR from 2011 to 2014. He has also recieved many awards including the 2015 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Physical sciences and he has recently been elected a fellow of both INSA and IAS.