Research

I study the system created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions with the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In these collisions it is expected that a hot, dense, deconfined medium of quarks and gluons is formed, known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). By measuring the properties of this medium, we learn about nuclear matter, the strong interaction, and Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD), at extreme temperatures and densities.

For a very brief introduction to heavy-ion physics, [here] is an 11-minute summary talk that I had the honor to give at the symposium celebrating The 50th Anniversary of Hadron Colliders at CERN in October 2021. The talk was written up in a CERN Courier article on Heavy-ion physics: past, present, and future.

My research focuses on three main areas:

1. Exploring the transition from small (proton-proton) to large (heavy-ion) collisions, in order to describe the observed phenomena within a consistent and coherent framework across system size.
2. Investigating the thermodynamic and hadrochemical properties of the QGP and the phase diagram of nuclear matter through measurements of the fluctuations of conserved quantum numbers, particularly strangeness and baryon number.
3. Probing the properties of the QGP by measuring the energy loss of high-momentum quarks and gluons as they traverse the medium before fragmenting into "jets" of hadrons.

My current research is supported by grants from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, VR) and the Crafoord Foundation.
I am also part of the CLASH project, supported by the Wallenberg Foundation, and the European Training Network SMARTHEP.
In the past I have been supported by fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the Marie Curie Action COFUND, and the Department of Energy Office of Science (USA).