Bachelor thesis topics
Students interested in a bachelor thesis in the group T30f are strongly advised to attend this list of lectures.
Topics
The topics offered for a bachelor thesis are
- Project 1 (Theoretical Physics)
Quarkonium dissociation at the Large Hadron Collider
Ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN explore heavy ion collisions in an unprecedented energy window, with lead nuclei colliding now at a centre-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per colliding nucleon pair. The aim of these experimental investigations is the formation of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), a new state of matter that should originate when nuclear matter undergoes a phase transition from its normal hadronic state to a deconfined partonic phase. This transition is predicted by QCD, the theory of strong interactions, at a temperature of about 170 MeV. Such studies have important cosmological and astrophysical implications, given that we believe that the QGP was existing in the early universe, filling all space a few microseconds after the Big-Bang.
Heavy quarkonium dissociation is one of the phenomena used to obtain information about the quark-gluon plasma formation in heavy-ion collisions. Recent theory results based on effective field theories gives a description of this phenomenon inside a Schrödinger equation with a complex potential. The aim of this thesis is to study the correct way of defining the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues for this problem and write a computer program able to find them numerically at different temperatures.
Prerequisites: Quantum Mechanics I and II and some basic knowledge of computer programming.
Advisors: Prof. N. Brambilla; PD Dr. A. Vairo; Dr. Miguel Escobedo - Project 2 (Theoretical Physics)
Hybrid Masses in QCD
Hybrid mesons are states formed by a quark and an antiquark and some gluonic degrees of freedom. They are searched at particle accelerator experiments and some candidates for heavy hybrids have recently been observed at B-factories.
The properties of these states are directly related to the nonperturbative nature of low energy QCD and to the confinement mechanism of strong interactions. Lattice calculations of the hybrids' static energies are available. The scope of the thesis is to use these lattice hybrids curves together with elementary notions of nonrelativistic effective field theories to solve numerically an appropriate Schrödinger equation and obtain information on the masses and transitions of the hybrids.
Prerequisites: Quantum Mechanics I and II and some basic knowledge of computer programming.
Advisors: Prof. N. Brambilla; PD Dr. A. Vairo; Matthias Berwein - Project 3 (Theoretical Physics)
Van der Waals interaction in QCD
In QuantumChromoDynamics (QCD, the theory of strong interactions) the interaction arising from the exchange of two or more gluons between color singlet hadrons is contained in gluonic van der Waals potentials, in a way similar to the Van der Waals interaction among molecules. The color van der Waals potential is expected to be the dominant contribution in the case of the interaction of heavy quarkonium states with hadrons or nuclei at low energies.
The properties of quarkonia in a nuclear medium are still poorly known, yet they are very important for the description of photo- and hadro-production of quarkonium on nuclear targets (at the planned experiments at the FAIR facility at GSI) as well as for the diagnostic of hadronic final states in heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The aim of this thesis is to study quarkonium-quarkonium Van der Waals interactions using a novel nonrelativistic effective field theory of QCD and study the related impact on quarkonium-nuclei interaction.
Prerequisites: Quantum Mechanics I and II and basic knowledge of perturbation theory.
Advisors: Prof. N. Brambilla; PD Dr. A. Vairo; Dr. M. Escobedo; Vladyslav Shtabovenko
Previous Theses
Some previous bachelor theses (found here) included these topics:
- Thermal production of dark matter
Dark matter should account for about the 21% of the matter components, but it cannot be explained inside the Standard model of particle physics. Part of the solution of the problem of dark matter may come from right-handed neutrinos. In some scenarios of physics beyond the Standard Model dark matter is accounted for by one generation of right-handed neutrinos. An important ingredient of these scenarios is the production rate of right-handed neutrinos from the thermal medium made by the Standard Model particles. In the literature there are diverse results on this issue and scope of the thesis is to analyze and review the state of the art.
Prerequisites: Quantum Mechanics I and II. Strong interest in particle physics (Standard Model and beyond), astrophysics.
Advisors: Prof. N. Brambilla; PD Dr. A. Vairo; Dr. M. Escobedo; S. Biondini. - Quirky Composite Dark Matter
"Quirky dark matter" is a proposed new dark matter candidate, a scalar baryonic bound state of a new non-abelian force that becomes strong at the electroweak scale. The bound state is made of chiral quirks: new fermions, acquiring mass from the Higgs mechanism. A novel method to search for quirky dark matter is to look for a gamma-ray “dark line” spectroscopic feature in galaxy clusters that result from the quirky Lyman-alpha or quirky hyperfine transitions.
Scope of the thesis is to address the quantum mechanical energy spectrum calculation of the quirky dark matter solving a Schroedinger-like equation with a quirkcolor force potential. Prospects for direct and indirect detection of quirky dark matter will be discussed in relation to experimental data.
Prerequisites: Quantum Mechanics I and II. Interest in particle physics (Standard Model and beyond), astrophysics.
Advisor: Prof. N. Brambilla; PD Dr. A. Vairo; Jacopo Ghiglieri - String Contribution to the Quark-Antiquark Potentials
The dynamics of heavy quarkonium systems in the strong coupling regime reduces to a quantum mechanical problem with a number of potentials which may be organized in powers of 1/m, m being the heavy quark mass. The potentials must be calculated non-perturbatively, for instance in lattice QCD. It is well known that the long distance behavior of the static potential is well reproduced by an effective string theory. Scope of this thesis is to address the calculation of the long distance behaviour of the 1/m and 1/m^2 suppressed potential using an effective string description. This amounts to establishing a correspondence between the fields and the string degrees of freedom, solving some string differential equations and calculating the corresponding Green's functions and potentials. A comparison of the obtained potential with the lattice data is planned.
Prerequisites: Quantum Mechanics I and II and basic knowledge of differential equations.
Advisors: Prof. N. Brambilla; PD Dr. A. Vairo; Piotr Pietrulewicz