Nominator's project description
| In the beginning it was hot. According to researchers, just after the Big Bang the universe was composed of an extremely hot and dense soup of different particles, the so-called quark-gluon plasma. From this emerged the building blocks of matter as we know them today. In order to reconstruct this state and discover more about the early universe, experiments are at the moment being conducted with the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN, near Geneva. This involves collisions of heavy nuclei, in which energy densities just like those present in the early universe can be reached and investigated. Dr. Vuorinen has set himself the goal of theoretically understanding and predicting properties of the extremely hot matter generated in the collisions. To this end, he carries out computations in which he applies novel mathematical tools relying among other things on Einstein's general theory of relativity, and which he hopes to be able to compare with experimental data from the LHC. This would be another step on the road to understanding the origins of the universe and its current form. |
