Aleksas Mazeliauskas

Dr. Aleksas Mazeliauskas

Group leader

What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
— Werner Heisenberg

Hello, my name is Aleksas Mazeliauskas. I am a theoretical physicist working on many-body phenomena emerging from interactions of a small number of particles in high-energy hadron collisions and ultracold quantum gases.

Since 2022 I have been leading an Emmy Noether Research Group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University. As of 2024, I am a project leader at the Collaborative Research Center ISOQUANT.

My group’s research focuses on the microscopic understanding of the emergent collective phenomena in systems of varying sizes and at varying energy scales. I am especially interested in the question of thermalisation and hydrodynamic behaviour in isolated quantum systems.

Check out my research projects, publications and profiles of my group members. See the news announcements for open positions and my blog for occasional posts about my life as a researcher.

News

Jan 09, 2026	Ferdinando Frascà is joining the group as a new PhD!
Jan 01, 2026	Adam Takacs is leaving to become a senior research fellow at CERN TH!
Nov 10, 2025	We are happy to welcome Sergio Barrera Cabodevila to the group as a new postdoctoral reasearcher!
Oct 30, 2025	Several new paper by my group: Bayesian Constraints on Pre-Equilibrium Jet Quenching and Predictions for Oxygen Collisions, Adiabatic hydrodynamization and quasinormal modes of nonthermal attractors, Minijet thermallization and jet transport coeffiecients in QCD kinetic theory and Deriving a parton shower for jet thermalization in QCD plasmas. Well done Adam and Fabian!
Oct 27, 2025	There is an open position for a bachelor/master thesis about numerical simulations of viscous hydrodynamics in my group! Contact me via email if interested.

Latest posts

Jul 02, 2025	First Oxygen Ion collisions at LHC July 2-5, 2025, I made a short but memorable trip to CERN, where—for the first time in its history—the LHC collided oxygen ions.
Nov 17, 2024	Light ion workshop at CERN November 11-15, 2024, I and my group (Adam, Fabian and Jannis) attended CERN TH workshop on Light ion collisions at the LHC.
Dec 26, 2023	First year of my Emmy Noether group As of October 2023, I have completed my first year (out of a maximum of six) as an Emmy Noether Research Group Leader at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Overall, it was a great and enjoyable year working with my group and other colleagues at Heidelberg University.

Selected publications

assets/img/publication_preview/Boguslavski_2025ylx.png

Minijet thermalization and jet transport coefficients in QCD kinetic theory

Kirill Boguslavski, Florian Lindenbauer, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 2 more authors

2025

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Boguslavski:2025ylx,
  author = {Boguslavski, Kirill and Lindenbauer, Florian and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Takacs, Adam and Zhou, Fabian},
  title = {{Minijet thermalization and jet transport coefficients in QCD kinetic theory}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2510.25669},
  reportnumber = {MIT-CTP/5948},
  month = oct,
  year = {2025},
}

Adiabatic hydrodynamization and quasinormal modes of nonthermal attractors

Matisse De Lescluze, Michal P. Heller, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 2 more authors

2025

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{DeLescluze:2025gaa,
  author = {De Lescluze, Matisse and Heller, Michal P. and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Scheihing-Hitschfeld, Bruno and Werthmann, Clemens},
  title = {{Adiabatic hydrodynamization and quasinormal modes of nonthermal attractors}},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2510.15016},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  month = oct,
  year = {2025},
}

assets/img/publication_preview/Mazeliauskas_2025clt.jpg

Energy loss baseline for light hadrons in oxygen-oxygen collisions at $ \sqrt{ s_\mathrm { NN } }=5.36\,\text{ TeV } $

Aleksas Mazeliauskas

2025

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Mazeliauskas:2025clt,
  author = {Mazeliauskas, Aleksas},
  title = {{ Energy loss baseline for light hadrons in oxygen-oxygen collisions at $$ \sqrt\{ s_\mathrm \{ NN \} \}=5.36\,\text\{ TeV \} $$ }},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2509.07008},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  month = sep,
  year = {2025},
}

assets/img/publication_preview/Berges_2025izb.jpg

Few is different: deciphering many-body dynamics in mesoscopic quantum gases

Juergen Berges, Sandra Brandstetter, Jasmine Brewer, and 27 more authors

In , 2025

DOI arXiv Cite

@inproceedings{Berges:2025izb,
  author = {Berges, Juergen and Brandstetter, Sandra and Brewer, Jasmine and Bruun, Georg and Enss, Tilman and Floerchinger, Stefan and Fujii, Keisuke and Galka, Maciej and Giacalone, Giuliano and Guan, Qingze and Heintze, Carl and Heyen, Lars H. and Selyuzhenkov, Ilya and Jochim, Selim and Levinsen, Jesper and Lunt, Philipp and Masciocchi, Silvia and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Navon, Nir and Ohlson, Alice and Parish, Meera and Reimann, Stephanie M. and Scazza, Francesco and Schaefer, Thomas and Teaney, Derek and Thywissen, Joseph and Venugopalan, Raju and Yan, Yangqian and Zaccanti, Matteo and Zache, Torsten V.},
  title = {{Few is different: deciphering many-body dynamics in mesoscopic quantum gases}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cond-mat.quant-gas},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2509.05049},
  month = sep,
  year = {2025},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

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Supercooled Goldstones at the QCD chiral phase transition

Adrien Florio, Eduardo Grossi, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 2 more authors

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2025

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Florio:2025zqv,
  author = {Florio, Adrien and Grossi, Eduardo and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Soloviev, Alexander and Teaney, Derek},
  title = {{Supercooled Goldstones at the QCD chiral phase transition}},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {135},
  issue = {24},
  pages = {242303},
  numpages = {7},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  month = dec,
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {American Physical Society},
  doi = {10.1103/wyn4-ncdc},
  url = {https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/wyn4-ncdc},
}

assets/img/publication_preview/Florio_2025lvu.png

Quenching through the QCD chiral phase transition

Adrien Florio, Eduardo Grossi, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 2 more authors

2025

arXiv Cite

@article{Florio:2025lvu,
  author = {Florio, Adrien and Grossi, Eduardo and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Soloviev, Alexander and Teaney, Derek},
  title = {{Quenching through the QCD chiral phase transition}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-lat},
  month = apr,
  year = {2025},
}

assets/img/publication_preview/Mazeliauskas_2025jyi.jpg

Hydrodynamic attractor in periodically driven ultracold quantum gases

Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Tilman Enss

2025

arXiv Cite

@article{Mazeliauskas:2025jyi,
  author = {Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Enss, Tilman},
  title = {{Hydrodynamic attractor in periodically driven ultracold quantum gases}},
  month = jan,
  year = {2025},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cond-mat.quant-gas},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

assets/img/publication_preview/Heller_2023mah.jpg

Prescaling Relaxation to Nonthermal Attractors

Michal P. Heller, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Thimo Preis

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2024

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Heller:2023mah,
  author = {Heller, Michal P. and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Preis, Thimo},
  title = {{Prescaling Relaxation to Nonthermal Attractors}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-th},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.071602},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {132},
  number = {7},
  pages = {071602},
  year = {2024},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

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Medium-Enhanced c\barc Radiation

Maximilian Attems, Jasmine Brewer, Gian Michele Innocenti, and 5 more authors

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2024

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Attems:2022otp,
  author = {Attems, Maximilian and Brewer, Jasmine and Innocenti, Gian Michele and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Park, Sohyun and van der Schee, Wilke and Soyez, Gregory and Wiedemann, Urs Achim},
  title = {{Medium-Enhanced $c\bar{c}$ Radiation}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2022-046},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.212301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {132},
  number = {21},
  pages = {212301},
  year = {2024},
}

assets/img/publication_preview/Brewer_2021kiv.png

Opportunities of OO and pO collisions at the LHC

Jasmine Brewer, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Wilke Schee

In Opportunities of OO and pO collisions at the LHC, 2021

arXiv Cite

@inproceedings{Brewer:2021kiv,
  author = {Brewer, Jasmine and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and van der Schee, Wilke},
  title = {{Opportunities of OO and $p$O collisions at the LHC}},
  booktitle = {{Opportunities of OO and pO collisions at the LHC}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2021-028},
  month = mar,
  year = {2021},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

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Discovering Partonic Rescattering in Light Nucleus Collisions

Alexander Huss, Aleksi Kurkela, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 3 more authors

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2021

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Huss:2020dwe,
  author = {Huss, Alexander and Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Paatelainen, Risto and van der Schee, Wilke and Wiedemann, Urs Achim},
  title = {{Discovering Partonic Rescattering in Light Nucleus Collisions}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2020-126},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.192301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {126},
  number = {19},
  pages = {192301},
  year = {2021},
}

Rev. Mod. Phys.
QCD thermalization: Ab initio approaches and interdisciplinary connections

Jürgen Berges, Michal P. Heller, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 1 more author

Rev. Mod. Phys., 2021

Abs DOI arXiv Cite

Heavy-ion collisions at BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider provide strong evidence for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma, with temperatures extracted from relativistic viscous hydrodynamic simulations shown to be well above the transition temperature from hadron matter. Outstanding problems in QCD include how the strongly correlated quark-gluon matter forms in a heavy-ion collision, its properties off equilibrium, and the thermalization process in the plasma. The theoretical progress in this field in weak-coupling QCD effective field theories and in strong-coupling holographic approaches based on gauge-gravity duality is reviewed. The interdisciplinary connections of different stages of the thermalization process to nonequilibrium dynamics in other systems across energy scales ranging from inflationary cosmology to strong-field QED to ultracold atomic gases are outlined, with emphasis placed on the universal dynamics of nonthermal and hydrodynamic attractors. Measurements in heavy-ion collisions are surveyed that are sensitive to the early nonequilibrium stages of the collision and the potential for future measurements is discussed. The current state of the art in thermalization studies is summarized and promising avenues for further progress are identified.
@article{Berges:2020fwq, author = {Berges, J\"urgen and Heller, Michal P. and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Venugopalan, Raju}, title = {{QCD thermalization: Ab initio approaches and interdisciplinary connections}}, archiveprefix = {arXiv}, primaryclass = {hep-th}, reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2020-080}, doi = {10.1103/RevModPhys.93.035003}, journal = {Rev. Mod. Phys.}, volume = {93}, number = {3}, pages = {035003}, year = {2021}, }

Phys. Rev. Lett.

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Hydrodynamic attractors, initial state energy and particle production in relativistic nuclear collisions

Giuliano Giacalone, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Sören Schlichting

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Giacalone:2019ldn,
  author = {Giacalone, Giuliano and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Schlichting, S\"oren},
  title = {{Hydrodynamic attractors, initial state energy and particle production in relativistic nuclear collisions}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {INT-PUB-19-036},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.262301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {123},
  number = {26},
  pages = {262301},
  year = {2019},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

assets/img/publication_preview/Kurkela_2018xxd.png

Chemical Equilibration in Hadronic Collisions

Aleksi Kurkela, and Aleksas Mazeliauskas

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Kurkela:2018xxd,
  author = {Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas},
  title = {{Chemical Equilibration in Hadronic Collisions}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2018-238},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.142301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {122},
  pages = {142301},
  year = {2019},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

assets/img/publication_preview/Mazeliauskas_2018yef.png

Prescaling and far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamics in the quark-gluon plasma

Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Jürgen Berges

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Mazeliauskas:2018yef,
  author = {Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Berges, J\"urgen},
  title = {{Prescaling and far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamics in the quark-gluon plasma}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.122301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {122},
  number = {12},
  pages = {122301},
  year = {2019},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

assets/img/publication_preview/Kurkela_2018wud.png

Matching the Nonequilibrium Initial Stage of Heavy Ion Collisions to Hydrodynamics with QCD Kinetic Theory

Aleksi Kurkela, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, Jean-François Paquet, and 2 more authors

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Kurkela:2018wud,
  author = {Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Paquet, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois and Schlichting, S\"oren and Teaney, Derek},
  title = {{Matching the Nonequilibrium Initial Stage of Heavy Ion Collisions to Hydrodynamics with QCD Kinetic Theory}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.122302},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {122},
  number = {12},
  pages = {122302},
  year = {2019},
}