A defining achievement of this programme is the creation of an experimental route for determining the QCD phase diagram using observables that can be directly compared with QCD calculations. This enabled the determination of the QCD quark-hadron transition temperature to be around 175 MeV and helped establish the Beam Energy Scan at RHIC as a major international scientific programme.

The collision-energy dependence of fluctuation observables, particularly net-baryon-number related measurements, has provided some of the most important experimental constraints on the existence and location of the QCD critical point. This programme also helped motivate theory coordination through BEST and lower-energy accelerator programmes such as FAIR and NICA.

Our work has contributed to the experimental observation of the deconfined state of quarks and gluons and to the study of its properties, including viscosity, conductivity, diffusion coefficient, and opacity. This body of work established collectivity, jet quenching, and strangeness enhancement as central signatures of quark-gluon plasma.

Multi-strange hadrons were used to probe partonic collectivity and to extract the shear-viscosity-to-entropy-density ratio, showing that QGP behaves as a near-perfect fluid. our group also developed and deployed particle-identification techniques needed for high-momentum hadron studies and resolved the long-standing question of whether strangeness enhancement arises from QGP formation rather than canonical suppression in proton collisions.

The observation of anti-alpha in heavy-ion collisions provided a control baseline for anti-helium production relevant to space-based measurements such as AMS. The programme also contributed to the observation of the heaviest strange antimatter nucleus, the anti-hypertriton.

These results have important implications for nuclear physics, cosmology, and astrophysics. The TWAS résumé also highlights later ALICE work on the absorption of anti-helium-3 in nuclear matter and its effect on galactic propagation.

Peripheral heavy-ion collisions generate enormous angular momentum. By measuring the spin alignment of neutral K* and ϕ vector mesons in non-central Pb-Pb collisions, our group showed evidence for spin-orbital angular momentum interactions in relativistic QCD matter for the first time at LHC energies.

These findings indicate the formation of a QGP fluid with the largest known vorticity. Our group came up with the idea for the ALICE study, was responsible for the analysis, wrote the paper, and presented the first results at an international conference.

The shorter lifetime of the K*0 resonance makes it a sensitive probe of the hadronic medium. Mohanty’s analysis showed that the ratio K*0/K− decreases with system size in heavy-ion collisions, while no corresponding suppression is seen in ϕ/K−, providing clear evidence for re-scattering effects at LHC energies.

This work was also used to estimate the lifetime of the hadronic phase. Measurements at higher transverse momentum showed suppression patterns that constrain particle-production mechanisms, fragmentation processes, and parton-energy-loss models in the QGP medium.

Using SuperCDMS CDMSlite detectors, our group and collaborators explored and set limits over a broad charge, mass, and velocity parameter space for lightly ionizing particles. To carry out this search, a new Monte Carlo method was established within the GEANT framework.

Another long-standing direction is the search for Disoriented Chiral Condensates. Our group helped establish photon production measurements in heavy-ion collisions and developed the experimental framework for DCC studies, including extensive work on photon multiplicity detectors used in WA98, STAR, and ALICE.

Our group has contributed to state-of-the-art R&D on solid-state detectors for direct dark matter and rare-event searches and on silicon-based detector systems for parton-distribution studies in ALICE.

The novel cryogenic prototype detectors with world-leading sensitivity and his leadership of the Indian contribution to the ALICE Forward Calorimeter, including successful fabrication in India of high-resistivity silicon pad arrays and their validation in laboratory and CERN beam tests.