Self-introduction: Yuuka Kanakubo

Hi, I’m Yuuka. I did my PhD at Sophia University in Japan, and moved to Finland and spent 2 years there as a postdoc at the University of Jyväskylä. Now, I have returned to Japan as a RIKEN-Berkeley fellow at iTHEMS.

Since my PhD, I have been working on the development of Monte-Carlo event generators for relativistic nuclear collisions. I am generally interested in a collision of large and heavy nuclei, such as lead ions or gold ions, with a large mass number. The typical collision energy reaches up to a few TeV per nucleon pair at their centre of mass. With these experimental setups, we can generate an extremely hot soup of quarks and gluons, known as “quark-gluon plasma”.

Relativistic nuclear collisions are dynamical processes with several different stages. I describe the collision process in full 3D and as dynamically as possible by sequentially applying different theoretical descriptions to each stage. For instance, I describe the production of quarks and gluons in the initial impact of colliding nuclei using perturbative QCD, the evolution of quark-gluon plasma with relativistic relativistic hydrodynamics combined with lattice QCD, and the interaction of hadrons in the final state using hadronic transport.

I believe iTHEMS is an excellent research environment in this aspect as the study requires diverse knowledge in, for example, nuclear structure, perturbative and non-perturbative QCD, thermodynamics, methodology in Monte-Carlo simulations of many-body systems etc. I am excited to discuss with people from various fields and hope to find new solutions or new ideas!