UNITY is excited to present the speaker for this quarter's Magnifying Voices in Physics (MVP) Series: Dr. Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli! Dr. RKE is an assistant Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University where she works primarily in the field of high energy nuclear physics.
Coffee/Tea with the speaker afterwards in RH 142
Please RSVP for the Seminar & Coffee so enough food and refreshments may be provided.
Abstract: The second half of the 20th century saw the advent of large scale particle accelerator and collider physics experiments. International collaborations involving thousands of scientists at places such as CERN in Switzerland, and across national laboratories in the US have focused their studies on plugging the gaps in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of nature. We discovered various different species of quarks, gluons, the Higgs particle, that provided mass and earned a Nobel and fundamental breakthrough prizes for those involved and also recreated the early universe via the production of quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions. As we have learned more about physics, we have gained massive utility as a byproduct of the research such as advancements in magnet, storage, data-pipeline, and medical physics technologies to name a few. Even though we have learned a lot regarding quarks and gluons, several key concepts still elude us! In this talk, I will walk us through a brief history of discoveries from particle colliders and highlight many of the unsolved problems especially in emergent phenomena where the rules that govern the many significantly vary than the rules that govern the individual. Lastly, we focus on the pathway towards the projected impact of the upcoming Electron Ion Collider both in terms of physics and developing a competent and excited scientific workforce for the discovery machine
About the Speaker
Dr. Raghav (Rithya) Kunnawalkam Elayavalli is an assistant Professor of Physics in the department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University since fall of 2022. Currently she is a Ruff Fant Dean’s faculty fellow from 2024-2026. She works primarily in the field of high energy nuclear physics since her masters at Stony Brook University back in 2011. Her masters thesis was in the setup of a simulation package for the future Electron Ion Collider called EICROOT where she studied the interaction of lepton-flavor violating processes. After her PhD at Rutgers University (2013-2017) with focus on measurements of QCD jets in varying collision systems at the CMS experiment at CERN, she moved her research back to RHIC science with postdoc positions at Wayne State University (2017-2022) and Yale/BNL (2020-2022) with the STAR collaboration. At Vanderbilt University, her main focus is on the new sPHENIX experiment at RHIC and the CMS experiment at LHC along with EIC physics heading into the future. She was recently awarded the DOE Early Career award for 2023 focused on measurements of the space-time evolution of quarks and gluons at RHIC. She is also an NSF funded co-PI of the JETSCAPE collaboration which includes both theorists and experimentalists focused on creating advanced analysis and statistical toolkits to extract fundamental properties of the QGP. She also runs a successful high school summer workshop aimed at the EIC physics that is publicly accessible and she encourages everyone to try the program towards the goal of making scientific research accessible to everyone including historically underrepresented peoples in sciences.