arXiv subjects

Jean-François Paquet

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-François Paquet.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Electromagnetic probes of concurrent minijet-hydrodynamics evolution

We investigate direct photon and dilepton production in a concurrent minijet-hydrodynamics framework that consistently incorporates event-by-event initial-state fluctuations and dynamical minijet-medium interactions. Produced in initial hard scatterings, minijets thermalize more slowly than the bulk medium and persist into the hydrodynamic stage, where they deposit energy and momentum into the evolving plasma, generating wakes that modify its spacetime evolution. Minijets modify the hadronic multiplicity and momentum anisotropy in a manner that can largely be absorbed by adjusting the shear viscosity and the normalization of the system's initial energy-momentum tensor. In contrast, electromagnetic probes are emitted throughout the evolution and remain directly sensitive to the underlying spacetime history. We perform a comprehensive calculation of direct photon and dilepton production with the minijets and bulk medium evolved simultaneously, using PYTHIA to produce minijets, and describing the underlying plasma with IP-Glasma initial conditions, hydrodynamic evolution with MUSIC and hadronic transport with UrQMD. We find that the minijet-induced modification of the hydrodynamic evolution produces measurable effects in both photon and dilepton observables, establishing electromagnetic radiation as a sensitive probe of the interplay between hard partons and the quark-gluon plasma.

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arXiv2026

Electromagnetic measurement of the temperature of quark-gluon plasma produced in central ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions

Ultrarelativistic collisions of large nuclei produce a short-lived plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons. Of all the GeV-energy photons detected in these nuclear collisions, only a small number are emitted directly by the quark-gluon plasma. The characteristic near-exponential energy spectrum of these photons is often associated with an effective temperature whose interpretation is complicated by spacetime averaging, Doppler shifts and other factors. We show that the Doppler shift's effect on the slope of the photon spectrum is generally modest and can either increase or decrease the slope, in contrast to the commonly assumed blue-shifting of the photon spectrum. We make the case that a minimal degree of modelling of quark-gluon plasma expansion provides a reasonable mapping between the slope of the photon energy spectrum and the maximum temperature of the plasma, as long as the slope is extracted at a reasonably high photon energy and thermal photons can be isolated from non-thermal sources. Validating our approach using state-of-the-art numerical calculations of photon production, we highlight the challenges of contamination from non-thermal sources.

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arXiv2025

Electromagnetic Radiation from Baryon-Rich Matter in Heavy-Ion Collisions

We perform a study of electromagnetic radiation in heavy-ion collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) Beam Energy Scan (BES) and SPS energies using the iEBE-MUSIC framework, which includes 3D dynamical Monte Carlo Glauber initial conditions, MUSIC (3+1)D viscous relativistic hydrodynamics, and the UrQMD hadronic afterburner. The multistage modeling has been calibrated to hadronic data at RHIC-BES energies using a Bayesian analysis. Integrating the thermal photon emission rates with the medium evolution, we study the direct photon yield and elliptic flow and how they vary with collision energy and emission source. We compare with results obtained by the STAR and PHENIX Collaborations. We employ next-to-leading order thermal QCD dilepton emission rates to compute dilepton invariant mass spectra and extract the effective temperature of the quark-gluon plasma at different collision energies.

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arXiv2025

Acausality-driven instabilities in transient relativistic viscous hydrodynamics

We investigate non-linear instabilities stemming from superluminal propagation of information in Israel-Stewart-like models of relativistic viscous fluid dynamics. In relativity, the characteristic speed of propagation of information, $w$, and the speed of the fluid, $v$, allow us to differentiate between regimes of the hydrodynamic equations that are acausal but stable ($w>1$), unstable ($v^{2} w^{2} \geq 1$), and covariantly ill-posed ($w^{2} \leq 0$). As an analytical benchmark, we present a new solution that illustrates these distinct regimes. We compare this analytical solution to the result of a numerical relativistic viscous fluid dynamics solver, and confirm that the analytical result can be recovered numerically in the stable regime, whether causal or acausal. The onset of numerical instabilities is further found to occur in the regime predicted by the analytical solution.

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arXiv2025

Feasibility of measuring the speed of sound of the quark-gluon plasma from the multiplicity and mean $p_T$ of ultracentral heavy-ion collisions

The mean transverse momentum $\langle p_T \rangle$ of hadrons has been observed experimentally and in numerical simulations to have a power-law dependence on the hadronic multiplicity $N$ in ultracentral relativistic heavy-ion collisions: $\langle p_{T} \rangle \propto N^{b_{\rm UC}}$. It has been put forward that this exponent $b_{\rm UC}$ is the speed of sound of quark-gluon plasma measured at a temperature determined from $\langle p_T \rangle$. We study step by step the connection between (i) the energy and entropy of hydrodynamic simulations and (ii) experimentally measurable observables. We show that an argument based on energy and entropy should yield an exponent equal to the pressure over energy density $P/\varepsilon$, rather than the speed of sound $c_s^2$; however, we also observe that $\langle p_T \rangle$ and $N$ are not sufficiently accurate proxies for the energy and entropy to make this possible in practice. From simulations, we find that the exponent $b_{\rm UC}$ is significantly different whether the ''effective volume'' is strictly constant or not, a condition that cannot be enforced experimentally. Additional tests using a modified equation of state find that the exponent $b_{\rm UC}$ exhibits a variable degree of correlations with the speed of sound and with $P/\varepsilon$, but is not an accurate measurement of either quantity in general.

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arXiv2025

Electromagnetic radiation from Quark-Gluon Plasma at finite baryon density

Using the Bayesian calibrated iEBE-MUSIC framework, we compute the production of electromagnetic radiation from hot hadronic matter at finite baryon density. Results for thermal photon and thermal dilepton yields are obtained by folding in-medium emission rates with posterior-sampled backgrounds evolved hydrodynamically. We consider different photon sources and analyze the collision-energy dependence of the thermal-to-prompt photon ratio. The sensitivity of the dilepton spectra to the pre-equilibrium stage is explored by considering different initialization procedures. Finally, we examine the impact on dilepton spectra of choosing parameter sets stemming from different Bayesian data analyses.

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arXiv2025

Applications of emulation and Bayesian methods in heavy-ion physics

Heavy-ion collisions provide a window into the properties of many-body systems of deconfined quarks and gluons. Understanding the collective properties of quarks and gluons is possible by comparing models of heavy-ion collisions to measurements of the distribution of particles produced at the end of the collisions. These model-to-data comparisons are extremely challenging, however, because of the complexity of the models, the large amount of experimental data, and their uncertainties. Bayesian inference provides a rigorous statistical framework to constrain the properties of nuclear matter by systematically comparing models and measurements. This review covers model emulation and Bayesian methods as applied to model-to-data comparisons in heavy-ion collisions. Replacing the model outputs (observables) with Gaussian process emulators is key to the Bayesian approach currently used in the field, and both current uses of emulators and related recent developments are reviewed. The general principles of Bayesian inference are then discussed along with other Bayesian methods, followed by a systematic comparison of seven recent Bayesian analyses that studied quark-gluon plasma properties, such as the shear and bulk viscosities. The latter comparison is used to illustrate sources of differences in analyses, and what it can teach us for future studies.

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arXiv2024

Analytical insights into the interplay of momentum, multiplicity and the speed of sound in heavy-ion collisions

We introduce a minimal model of ultracentral heavy-ion collisions to study the relation between the speed of sound of the produced plasma and the final particles' energy and multiplicity. We discuss how the particles' multiplicity $N_{\textrm{tot}}$ and average energy $E_{\textrm{tot}}/N_{\textrm{tot}}$ is related to the speed of sound $c_s$ by $c_s^2=d \ln (E_{\textrm{tot}}/N_{\textrm{tot}})/d\ln N_{\textrm{tot}}$ if the fluid is inviscid, its speed of sound is constant and all final particles can be measured. We show that finite rapidity cuts on the particles' multiplicity $N$ and energy $E$ introduce corrections between $c_s^2$ and $d \ln (E/N)/d\ln N$ that depend on the system's lifetime. We study analytically these deviations with the Gubser hydrodynamic solution, finding that, for ultrarelativistic bosons, they scale as the ratio of the freezeout temperature $T_{\mathrm{FO}}$ over the maximum initial temperature of the fluid $T_{0}$; the non-thermodynamic aspect of these corrections is highlighted through their dependence on the system's initial conditions.

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arXiv2024

The effect of causality constraints on Bayesian analyses of heavy-ion collisions

There have long been questions about the limits to the validity of relativistic fluid dynamics, and whether it is being used outside its regime of validity in modern simulations of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. An important new tool for answering this question is a causality analysis in the nonlinear regime -- if the solutions of the evolution equations do not respect relativistic causality, they are not a faithful representation of the underlying relativistic theory (in this case, quantum chromodynamics). Using this non-linear criterion, it has recently been shown that hydrodynamics is indeed being used outside its regime of validity in simulations, at least sometimes. Here we explore the phenomenological implications, particularly the quantitative effects of demanding limits on acausality in modern Bayesian parameter estimation. We find that, while typically only a small fraction of the system's energy is initially in an acausal regime, placing strict limits on the allowed energy fraction significantly changes the preferred properties of the initial condition, which in turn alters the extracted medium properties such as bulk viscosity, where large values are no longer favored. These findings highlight the importance of developing better theoretical descriptions of the early-time, out-of-equilibrium dynamics of relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

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arXiv2024

Bayesian quantification of strongly-interacting matter with color glass condensate initial conditions

A global Bayesian analysis of relativistic Pb + Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s}_{\rm NN}$ = 2.76 TeV is performed, using a multistage model consisting of an IP-Glasma initial state, a viscous fluid dynamical evolution, and a hadronic transport final state. The observables considered are from the soft sector hadronic final state. Posterior and Maximum a Posteriori parameter distributions that pertain to the IP-Glasma and hydrodynamic phases are obtained, including the shear and bulk specific viscosity of strong interacting matter. The first use of inference with transfer learning in heavy-ion analyses is presented, together with Bayes Model Averaging.

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arXiv2023

Thermal photon production in Gubser inviscid relativistic fluid dynamics

The Gubser solution to inviscid relativistic fluid dynamics is used to examine the role of transverse expansion on the energy spectrum of photons radiated by quark-gluon plasma. Transverse flow is shown to be a modest effect on the energy spectrum of photons as a whole, despite its large effect on rare high-energy photons produced at low temperatures. An exact expression is derived for the volume of the plasma as a function of its temperature. A simple formula is obtained for the energy spectrum of high-energy thermal photons, which is used to relate the inverse slope $T_{\textrm{eff}}$ of the photon spectrum at energy $E$ to the maximum temperature of the plasma $T_0$, finding $T_{\textrm{eff}} \approx T_0/(1+\frac{5}{2} \frac{T_0}{E})$.

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arXiv2023

Electromagnetic probes in heavy-ion collisions: progress and open questions

I present an overview of photon and dilepton production in heavy-ion collisions, highlighting recent progress and ongoing challenges, with focus on hard initial scatterings, pre-equilibrium electromagnetic emission, as well as thermal and hadronic production. The potential of photons and dileptons to probe low-energy collisions is discussed briefly.

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arXiv2023

Illuminating early-stage dynamics of heavy-ion collisions through photons at RHIC BES energies

Heavy-ion collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}} \sim 10$ GeV probe the QCD phase diagram at large baryon densities. Because the longitudinal Lorentz contraction is small at these collision energies, understanding the dynamics during the early phase of the collision is essential for the subsequent modeling of the system evolution and for constraining the QGP transport properties at finite baryon densities. Direct photons provide undistorted information on early-stage dynamics. We model relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC Beam Energy Scan energies with a hybrid dynamical approach consisting of a 3D-Glauber initial state followed by viscous hydrodynamics and hadronic transport (MUSIC + UrQMD). The implemented thermal photon emission takes into account the enhancement from finite baryon chemical potentials. We show that direct photon spectra and their anisotropic flow coefficients have a strong sensitivity to the early stage of heavy-ion collisions. Thus, they provide constraints on QGP dynamics complementary to those obtained from hadronic observables.

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arXiv2023

Early-times Yang-Mills dynamics and the characterization of strongly interacting matter with statistical learning

In ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons is formed within $1$ fm/c of the nuclei's impact. The complex dynamics of the collision before $\approx 1$ fm/c is often described with parametric models, which affect the predictivity of calculations. In this work, we perform a systematic analysis of LHC measurements from Pb-Pb collisions, by combining an \emph{ab-initio} model of the early stage of the collisions with a hydrodynamic model of the plasma. We obtain state-of-the-art constraints on the shear and bulk viscosity of quark-gluon plasma. We mitigate the additional cost of the ab-initio initial conditions by combining Bayesian model averaging with transfer learning, allowing us to account for important theoretical uncertainties in the hydrodynamics-to-hadron transition. We show that, despite the apparent strong constraints on the shear viscosity, metrics that balance the model's predictivity with its degree of agreement with data do not prefer a temperature-dependent specific shear viscosity over a constant value. We validate the model by comparing with discriminating observables not used in the calibration, finding excellent agreement.

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arXiv2023

Computational budget optimization for Bayesian parameter estimation in heavy ion collisions

Bayesian parameter estimation provides a systematic approach to compare heavy ion collision models with measurements, leading to constraints on the properties of nuclear matter with proper accounting of experimental and theoretical uncertainties. Aside from statistical and systematic model uncertainties, interpolation uncertainties can also play a role in Bayesian inference, if the model's predictions can only be calculated at a limited set of model parameters. This uncertainty originates from using an emulator to interpolate the model's prediction across a continuous space of parameters. In this work, we study the trade-offs between the emulator (interpolation) and statistical uncertainties. We perform the analysis using spatial eccentricities from the T$_\mathrm{R}$ENTo model of initial conditions for nuclear collisions. Given a fixed computational budget, we study the optimal compromise between the number of parameter samples and the number of collisions simulated per parameter sample. For the observables and parameters used in the present study, we find that the best constraints are achieved when the number of parameter samples is slightly smaller than the number of collisions simulated per parameter sample.

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arXiv2022

Out-of-Equilibrium Photon Production in the Late Stages of Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

In this work, we assess the importance of non-equilibrium dynamics in the production of photons from the late stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The p$_\mathrm{T}$-differential spectra and $v_2$ of photons from the late hadronic stage are computed within a non-equilibrium hadron transport approach, and compared to the results of a local equilibrium evolution using ideal relativistic hydrodynamics. It is found that non-equilibrium dynamics enhance the late-stage photon production at low p$_\mathrm{T}$ and decreases it at higher p$_\mathrm{T}$ compared to the estimate from hydrodynamics. This same comparison points to a significant increase in the momentum anisotropies of these photons due to non-equilibrium dynamics. Once combined with photons produced above the particlization temperature in the hydrodynamics evolution, the differences between the two approaches appear modest in what concerns the p$_\mathrm{T}$ differential spectra, but are clearly noticeable at low p$_\mathrm{T}$ for the elliptic flow: non-equilibrium dynamics enhance the photon $v_2$ below p$_\mathrm{T}$ $\approx 1.4$ GeV.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2022

Parton energy loss in a hard-soft factorized approach

An energetic parton travelling through a quark-gluon plasma loses energy via occasional hard scatterings and frequent softer interactions. Whether or not these interactions admit a perturbative description, the effect of the soft interactions can be factorized and encoded in a small number of transport coefficients. In this work, we present a hard-soft factorized parton energy loss model which combines a stochastic description of soft interactions and rate-based modelling of hard scatterings. We introduce a scale to estimate the regime of validity of the stochastic description, allowing for a better understanding of the model's applicability at small and large coupling. We study the energy and fermion-number cascade of energetic partons as an application of the model.

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arXiv2022

Multi-messenger heavy-ion collision physics

This work studies the production of direct photons in relativistic nuclear collisions, along with the production of hadrons. Radiation from the very first instants to the final moments of the evolution is included. The hybrid model used here describes all stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Chronologically, those are an initial state reflecting the collision of nuclei described within the Color Glass Condensate effective theory; a pre-equilibrium phase based on non-equilibrium linear response; relativistic viscous hydrodynamics, and a hadronic afterburner. The effect of the pre-equilibrium phase on both photonic and hadronic observables is highlighted for the first time. The potential of photon observables -- spectrum, differential elliptic and triangular flow -- to reveal the chemical equilibration time is studied. Finally, we consider "small collision systems", including proton+nucleus collisions and collisions of light nuclei, as probed by hadronic and electromagnetic observables. We demonstrate how photon production can signal the formation of quark-gluon plasma in such small systems.

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