Renan Hirayama finished his PhD in the group of FIAS Fellow Hannah Elfner in February. During his PhD he studied how pairs of particles called dileptons are produced when heavy atomic nuclei collide at very high speeds. He did this for all available beam energies, using a combined method that links particle-transport simulations with fluid-dynamics calculations.

Like most research in this area, the work involved several areas of physics, from statistical mechanics to quantum chromodynamics, and also a lot of programming. The effort was worth it, and Hirayama will continue working on this topic during a postdoc at McGill University (Canada): " I believe this area to be the most promising for understanding matter in extreme thermodynamic conditions.”