Contact
Hannah Bossi
My work with the ALICE Collaboration began in 2017, when I worked under the supervision of Dr. Markus Fasel on the reconstruction of the K0s. This work was sponsored by the Michigan REU Summer Student Program. After this summer project, I continued to stay involved in ALICE, working on pi0 and eta reconstruction under the supervision of Dr. Friederike Bock. This work was completed concurrently with my undergraduate thesis work exploring Lorentz symmetry breaking in Horava gravity. In 2018, I graduated from Colby College with a Bachelor's degree in both physics and computer science. In the fall of 2018, I began my graduate studies at Yale University working in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Group under the supervision of Professor John Harris and Professor Helen Caines. The predominant focus of my graduate studies is jet physics in ALICE. My work at Yale is partially supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which I earned in 2020.
Generally, my research interests concern the use of jets as a probe for studying the Quark-Gluon plasma. I am drawn to the challenge of jet measurements, particularly in heavy-ion collisions where the large uncorrelated background makes inclusive jet measurements quite difficult (especially at low transverse momentum and large resolution parameters). My graduate work has focused on extending current measurements of jet suppression to larger resolution parameters and lower in transverse momentum in order to disentangle the relative contributions of various energy loss mechanisms. This work is done via a novel machine learning based background correction, and is the first application of machine learning to heavy-ion jet measurements in ALICE. My collaborators on this project include Laura Havener (Yale), Raymond Ehlers (ORNL) and Constantin Loizides (ORNL). This method extends an existing method developed by Ruediger Haake and Constantin Loizides for both charged and full jets which contain both the charged and neutral component of the jet. I am additionally active in the software development for ALICE in Run 3, focusing on the bad channel calibration of the electromagnetic calorimeter and the jet framework.
In addition to my research interests, I am also passionate about promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in physics. Recently, this has meant serving as the social chair for Yale's Graduate Women in Physics Group and serving on the Graduate Student Advisory Committee as well as the Qualifying Exam and Graduate Curriculum Review Committee . Laura Havener and myself are also working to organize an ALICE Masterclass at Yale as a part of the larger international masterclass program. Within the ALICE collaboration, I also serve as one of the three Junior Representatives.
Selected publications
Hannah Bossi