RHIC and the QGP at 10: from the 'age of discovery' to the 'age of exploration'

Journal Article · Mon May 23 00:00:00 EDT 2011 · AIP Conference Proceedings

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3574951· OSTI ID:21513240

Caines, Helen ^[1]

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1. Physics Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520 (United States)

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the beginning of RHIC operations. Soon after collisions began it was shown that the temperatures and densities reached in Au+Au collisions of 200 GeV per nucleon are vastly above those where hadrons can exist. A new state-of-matter is created - the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). We now know the QGP is strongly interacting and essentially opaque to gluons and quarks passing through it and that it flows like an almost perfect fluid. There is, however, much still to be learned about the QGP's properties and how the transition from quarks and gluons to hadrons occurs. These issues are the focus of the ongoing research at RHIC and the LHC, where first Pb-Pb collisions are expected at the end of this year. A new project at RHIC is the beam energy scan. The goal of this endeavor is a more detailed study of the phase diagram of nuclear matter, with the exciting prospect of locating predicted key features such as the critical point - where the phase boundary between the hadronic gas and the QGP ends.

• OSTI ID: 21513240
• Journal Information: AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1343, Issue 1; Conference: QCHS 9: 9. international conference on quark confinement and the hadron spectrum, Madrid (Spain), 30 Aug - 3 Sep 2010; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.3574951; (c) 2011 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 0094-243X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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GEV RANGE 100-1000
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NUCLEAR MATTER
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