Description
Prof. Dr. Barbara Jacak (UC Berkeley), "Heavy Ion Physics: Interactions inside the quark gluon plasma"
The plasma of quarks and gluons formed in heavy ion collisions has some extraordinary properties. It flows hydrodynamically, with almost no friction. Furthermore, it is very opaque to any quark or gluon that tries to traverse it. This is due to the strength of the interactions among the particles within the plasma, which has been discovered to be an excellent example of a strongly-coupled plasma. Such plasmas are dominated by many-body interactions. In the quark gluon plasma we can study the many-body physics of the strong interaction, which has similarities to the more common electromagnetically interacting plasmas. I will discuss how we measure properties and interactions of quark gluon plasma, and how those can be understood theoretically.
