Bachelor defense by Misiki Bharadwaz

Abstract

Quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is a state of matter consisting of deconfined quarks and gluons, and is thought to have existed in the early universe, microseconds after the Big Bang. Experiments such as ALICE at CERN aim to create and study QGP through nuclear collisions. Among the observables used to characterise QGP, anisotropic flow is a widely used tool, describing the collective motion of particles produced in the collision and providing information about the properties of the medium. While heavy-ion collisions have long been the primary means of studying QGP, flow has recently also been observed in small collision systems. In this thesis, the statistical stability of flow measurements in small systems is investigated in small systems is investigated using toy Monte Carlo simulations, which are used to quantify the required statistics for reliable flow measurements. In addition, the reliability of flow measurements under varying detector conditions is studied using two frameworks for flow calculations. The classical Generic Framework is compared with the recently proposed Unified Algorithm, which is found to provide a robust method for flow calculations, even in regions of reduced detector acceptance.