Learning from heavy-ion collisions about the ions' geometry and the way QCD flows

• Seyed Farid Taghavi (Technical University Munich)

The collision of heavy ions in the hadron colliders produces a rich environment to study different aspects of QCD, from the geometry of the hadrons bound states in heavy ions to the collective evolution of a hot medium made of quarks and gluons, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Modeling various aspects of the experiment and extracting information from the measurements are the main challenges in the heavy-ion community. This talk overviews the latest physical picture of heavy-ion collisions and the systematic methods to improve this picture, exploiting the measurements. In particular, I will discuss the Bayesian approach to infer the model parameters from data. I will present speculations about the applicability of hydrodynamics when the produced matter is around the size of a proton. I will also discuss the deformation of heavy ions and extracting their geometry by using flow analysis of two isobar elements.