Heavy-ion collisions - hot QCD in a lab
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
High-energy heavy-ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the properties of the hot and dense strongly-interacting system composed of deconfined quarks and gluons -- the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) -- in laboratory conditions. The formation of a QGP is predicted by lattice QCD calculations as a crossover transition from hadronic matter (at zero baryochemical potential) and is expected to take place once the system temperature reaches values above 155 MeV and/or the energy density above $$0.5~\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{fm}^{3}$$. The nature of such a strongly coupled QGP has been linked to the early Universe at some microseconds after the Big Bang. To characterize the physical properties of the short-lived matter (lifetime of about $$10~\mathrm{fm}/c$$) experimental studies at Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider and the Large Hadron collider use auto-generated probes, such as high-energy partons created early in the hadronic collisions, thermally emitted photons, and a set of particle correlations that are sensitive to the collective expansion and the dynamics of the system. The lectures briefly introduced some of the experimental techniques and provided a glimpse at some of the results.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 1594907
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: XIV International Workshop on Hadron Physics, Florianopolis (Brazil), 18-23 March 2018
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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