2026-07-14 - NITheCS & MITP Seminar: 'Using Heavy Quarks to Study the Primordial' Jean du Plessis

2026-07-14 - NITheCS & MITP Seminar: 'Using Heavy Quarks to Study the Primordial Liquid' by Jean du Plessis (MIT, USA) 📺 Watch the full NITheCS/NITheP Colloquium and Webinars playlist here:    • NITheCS/NITheP Colloquium and Webinars   ABSTRACT Heavy quarks provide a valuable probe of the quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions. Produced in the earliest hard scatterings and approximately conserved throughout the subsequent evolution, they are sensitive to the medium over a wide range of momentum scales. At the same time, describing their dynamics in a unified way remains a major theoretical and phenomenological challenge, since one must connect ultra-relativistic energy loss to the late time Brownian-like motion of almost thermalised heavy quarks within a single framework. In this talk I will present our recent extension of the hybrid strong/weak-coupling model of jet quenching to heavy flavour, including momentum broadening and in-medium hadronisation, and explain how it captures the relevant physics across these regimes. I will discuss the underlying transport picture, the theoretical issues that arise in matching the different dynamical limits, and the implications for heavyflavour observables and for our broader understanding of heavy-quark transport in QCD matter. I will also touch on recent theoretical and ongoing phenomenological work on the effects of non-Gaussianities in the distribution of momentum transfers on our understanding of quark-gluon plasma. Biography Jean du Plessis is a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Theoretical Physics, where his research focuses on quantum chromodynamics, strong interaction dynamics, and quark-gluon plasma. Prior to joining MIT, he completed his Bachelor’s degree at Stellenbosch University and a Master’s degree at the University of Cape Town. His academic contributions include co-authored research on holographic heavy quark energy loss and transport properties in dense nuclear matter