Speaker
Mark Gorenstein
Description
My talk is dedicated to the memory of Gennady Zinoviev, the organizer and head of the department of High Energy Density Physics from 1985 to 2021. I present a brief history, current status and plans of the search for new phase structures of the matter at high energy density — the quark gluon plasma and QCD critical point — in relativistic nucleus–nucleus collisions. The basic ideas are introduced, and the path towards the quark–gluon plasma discovery is sketched. Then the status of the search for the critical point is discussed. I present also several examples of the fruitful collaboration between our theoretical department and CERN experimental collaborations NA49 and NA61/SHINE.