Choose timezone
Your profile timezone:
CERN Heavy Ion Forum
Update on the Search for Chiral Symmetry Restoration in Heavy-Ion Collisions
by
→
Europe/Zurich
160/1-009 (CERN)
Description
The spectrum of hadrons is intimately related to the structure of the QCD vacuum which is filled with quark and gluon condensates. Thus, upon heating the vacuum, a melting of the condensates is bound to induce medium modifications of the hadronic spectrum, ultimately leading to the formation of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Dilepton invariant-mass spectra are the only known observable in high-energy heavy-ion collisions which enable a direct access to medium modifications of a hadronic spectral function (in the vector channel). In particular, thermal radiation of low-mass dileptons (M<1.5GeV) has long been regarded as the most promising tool to ``detect" the melting of the chiral quark condensate (or ``chiral symmetry restoration"), through the modifications of the light vector mesons (rho, omega, phi). We discuss recent progress in this endeavor, including the use of sum rules to connect order parameters from lattice QCD with effective hadronic theory, and the interpretation of recent measurements of a (surprisingly?) large elliptic flow in photon radiation.
Organised by
Y. Foka, U. Wiedemann
