Dhanush Hangal
I am a graduate student in the [Heavy Ion Nuclear Physics](http://starcluster.phy.uic.edu//twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome) Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
I work on the [Compact Muon Solenoid](https://cms.cern/tags/heavy-ions) (CMS) experiment which detects particles produced from high-energy proton-proton (pp) and lead-lead (PbPb) nuclei collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located near Geneva, Switzerland. Together with many physicists from all over the world we study the properties of matter under extreme temperatures and densities in order to better understand how the Universe might have looked like right after its creation. When two ultra-relativistic nuclei collide, they deposit a fraction of their energies into the space between them, which results in heating up the vacuum to temperatures around one million times hotter than the center of the sun. That super-hot vacuum is believed to create what is called a [Quark Gluon Plasma](https://home.cern/about/physics/heavy-ions-and-quark-gluon-plasma) (QGP), a system of deconfined and strongly interacting quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons in thermal equilibrium. My group studies the modifications of the properties of jets in PbPb collisions relative to pp collisions to better understand the effects of the QGP medium on partons traversing the hot nuclear matter.
I have a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (Integrated M.Sc. 2015). In the past, I have worked at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (2012), Department of High Energy Physics, TIFR, Mumbai (2013) and at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in KIT, Germany (2014).