Ordinary hadronic matter undergoes a phase transition to the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) under extreme conditions of temperature or density. In the universe, the reverse transition took place just a few microseconds after the Big Bang; the basic building blocks of nature, the hadrons, were formed at this time. Today, these conditions can be recreated in the laboratory, in ongoing Heavy-Ion Collisions (HICs) at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

On the theoretical side, the fundamental theory of strong interactions (quantum chromodynamics or QCD) can be solved under the same conditions by numerically simulating the interactions between quarks and gluons on a discretized grid (lattice). Such simulations are running on the most powerful supercomputers in the world and allow a precise determination of the QGP properties from first principles. In her research, Dr. Claudia Ratti uses these theoretical tools to study the properties of this new phase of matter and to calculate observables, which can be compared to RHIC and LHC data.