Graduate School in Physics and Astrophysics ------------------------------------------- ANNUAL REPORT ------------------------------------------- Fill with a text editor (without TAB or formatting) Repeat fields for each course as necessary. ------------------------------------------- name: Alba Paolo Giuseppe email: paoloalbag@gmail.com ciclo: XXVIII year completed (1,2 or 3): 1 supervisor: Alberico Wanda ------------------------------------------- GRADUATE SCHOOL COURSES (only completed courses, with examination passed in the year) code: 01 title: Gravitational waves teacher: A. Nagar hours: 12 code: 02 title: Effective field theories for heavy-quark physics teacher: P. Gambino hours: 10 code: 03 title: Inference and analysis of information flow in complex systems teacher: Stramaglia, Caselle hours: 10 code: 04 title: Non-perturbative methods for quark-gluon plasma teacher: C. Ratti, M. Nardi hours: 12 code: 05 title: Non-perturbative solutions in field theory: solitons and instantons teacher: M. Billò hours: 10 ------------------------------------------- SUMMER SCHOOLS, INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS (only those attended in the current year) title: ECT* Doctoral Training Programme, "Neutron-rich matter: constraints from nuclear pèhysics and astrophysics" place: Trento webpage: http://www.ectstar.eu/node/90 days: 5 talk or poster (Y/N): N title: Quark-Gluon Plasma and Heavy Ion Collisions: past, present, future place: Siena webpage: http://www.hadrons.to.infn.it/QGP_School/Home.html days: 5 talk or poster (Y/N): Y title: Joliot Curie School, A Colourful Journey: from hadrons to quark-gluon plasma place: Frejus (Francia) webpage: http://ejc2013.sciencesconf.org/ days: 6 talk or poster (Y/N): Y ------------------------------------------- CONFERENCES, WORKSHOP (only those attended in the current year) title: XIV Convegno su Problemi di Fisica Nucleare Teorica place: Cortona webpage: http://www.df.unipi.it/~marcucci/cort2013/index.html days: 3 talk or poster (Y/N): Y --------------------------------------------------- Research activity/Publications in the current year (max characters 2500) BE AWARE: research activity and Pubs are not evaluated as didactic credits, but are requested to trace the PhD students' career My research activity concerns the study of the QCD phase diagram, in particular the transition from hadrons to the deconfined state called Quark-Gluon Plasma. In the first part of my activity I familiarized myself with the Hadron-Resonance Gas model, which is one of the main tools to interpret the results of lattice QCD thermodynamics in the hadronic phase, as well as to describe many experimental data from Heavy Ion Collisions (HICs). This led to the development of a program to calculate the Equation of State (EoS) of QCD in different situations. Such EoS is needed to run simulations based on the hydrodynamic evolution of the system created in HICs, under conditions as close as possible to the experimental ones. An essential feature of the EoS which I calculated is the possibility to have result at finite density, useful for the future FAIR experiment, which is designed to explore the high density region of the QCD phase diagram. At the same time I worked on a theoretical model for the deconfined phase of QCD. The model is based on quasi-particle degrees of freedom (gluons so far, extension to quarks is in progress), propagating in a Polyakov loop field background; the aim of such a model is to describe the deconfined phase in terms of free quasi-particles with a temperature-dependent effective mass which effectively incorporates all the non-perturbative effects. The use of a Polyakov loop background field, coupled to the quasi-particles, corrects the unphysical divergence of the gluonic effective mass at the transition. Such a work is useful to understand the evolution of the degrees of freedom during the evolution of a HIC; besides, the behavior of the gluonic effective mass as a function of the temperature can be used as an information for further studies. Recently, I concentrated on the analysis of fluctuations of conserved charges (electric charge, baryon number and strangeness) in HICs in order to determine the freeze-out conditions (temperature and chemical potential) by comparing the experimental data to the Hadron Resonance Gas model results at finite temperature and chemical potentials. The use of fluctuations and of their ratios is useful to this purpose because they are measured at the hadronic freeze-out: by comparing the experimental value to the HRG model curve, one can extract the values of temperature and chemical potential at which the freeze-out occurred. During the whole year I worked in collaboration with Dr. Claudia Ratti and Dr. Marcus Bluhm. My research activity has led so far to a publication [1], other two will be ready soon. References [1] M. Bluhm, P. Alba, W. Alberico, A. Beraudo, C. Ratti Lattice QCD-based equations of state at vanishing net-baryon density, arXiv:1306.6188 [hep-ph], submitted to Physics Letters B.