Welcome to Mike Sas who comes to us as a postgraduate associate pending degree working with Helen Caines. He is an experimental physicist interested in studying the nature of heavy-ion collisions at the LHC using the ALICE experiment. His focus is on understanding the microscopic dynamics of the quark gluon plasma, mainly by studying the photons that are radiated by or originate from this droplet of hot QCD matter.
Furthermore, He is interested in performing the analyses involving the photons in Pb-Pb as well as in p-Pb and pp collisions, which gives us additional insight in particle production mechanisms of highly energetic particle collisions across all system sizes. Main publication on Direct photon flow in Pb-Pb collisions: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04403
Outside of physics he has quite a few hobbies that he is passionate about; playing piano and enjoying classical music, mountain biking and hiking. Moreover, he likes to create abstract paintings related to math and physics. Last year one of his paintings even made it to an exhibition at the largest dutch national physics conference. He is looking forward to create a few more with all the inspiration of the next couple of years!