I am a postdoc working with the Laboratory of Nuclear Science (LNS) at MIT. Previously, I was working as a postdoc with the European Research Council (ERC) project “QCDHighDensityCMS” with the Sapienza Universita di Roma (2023–2024) and Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet at École Polytechnique (2021–2023). Since my PhD, I have worked on experimental high-energy physics with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of the general purpose detectors at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and on particle phenomenology.

My main research interest is the emergent behavior of the strong nuclear force at short distances, described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In CMS, I am active in both the standard model (SMP) and heavy-ion (HIN) groups. I am currently working on ultraperipheral collision and jet substructure measurements in proton-proton and lead-lead collisions. I also work on phenomenology to propose new QCD observables or new physics searches. During my PhD at the  University of Kansas in the U.S., I was working on diffractive and small-x physics with CMS and TOTEM and in photon-induced processes.

I am currently physics convener of the forward and ultraperipheral collisions group in CMS and coordinate efforts on the Level-1 trigger of CMS for the heavy-ion data taking (2024 & 2025).

Email: cbaldene _at_ mit.edu

Secondary Lund planes for high-purity gluon jet showers

We proposed a way of isolating a high-purity gluon jet sample based on secondary Lund jet plane at the LHC. We found it’s possible to obtain gluon purities & gluon jet substructure with high resilience to the quark/gluon jet fraction variations, without relying on taggers or statistical separation of quark vs gluon jets.

Photon-tagged jet substructure in PbPb and pp collisions

We showed how selection biases on jet energy loss can mimic other effects (such as medium resolution length) by selecting jets according to their “unquenched” energies with isolated photons recoiling from jets. The measurement is a piece of the puzzle on the interpretation of similar studies in inclusive jets, where it is harder to control energy loss & where a modification is observed.

Primary Lund plane density

We measured the primary Lund plane density of emissions (a representation of phase-space of intrajet radiation constructed using Cambridge/Aachen reclustering) using the full Run-2 dataset in CMS. The primary Lund plane density contains a significant amount of information about the jet shower with minimal dimensionality (angle & transverse momentum).