This June, we hosted Hard Probes 2026 at Vanderbilt University, welcoming colleagues from around the world to Nashville for a week of physics and conversation.
The conference explores what high-energy particles can tell us about matter under extreme conditions. Among its central questions: what happens when an energetic quark or gluon travels through the hot, dense matter created in collisions of atomic nuclei?
Our group contributed several talks and posters:
- Yilun Wu presented a CMS study using machine learning to identify jets that have lost energy while travelling through the hot matter created in heavy-ion collisions.
- Preston White presented CMS studies of how the energy distribution inside jets changes across different collision systems.
- Jingyu Zhang presented measurements of energy and charge patterns using DELPHI Open Data, along with a JETSCAPE poster on tools for bringing together jet measurements and model comparisons.
- Kuan (Luke) Lu presented a poster examining how particles are distributed around the jet axis in archived ALEPH electron-positron collision data.
- Shuangyi (Bill) Zhou presented a poster studying jets of different sizes using archived ALEPH data.
Hosting made this conference especially meaningful for us. It was a chance to share our work, catch up with collaborators, and welcome the wider community to our home campus.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in Nashville, and to the other co-organizers, students and volunteers who helped make the week happen!
See our Talks page for presentation details.