Speaker
Brian Cole
(Physics Dept., Pupin Physics Lab.-Columbia University-Unknown)
Description
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory was designed to explore the confinement to de-confinement transition in QCD at high temperatures and low baryon densities. Results from the RHIC program have provided overwhelming circumstantial evidence for the formation of quark gluon plasma in nuclear collisions at RHIC. Estimates obtained from several different RHIC measurements indicate that collisions between gold nuclei at the top RHIC energy of 200 GeV per colliding nucleon pair produce matter at an energy density in excess of 10 GeV/fm^3 or at temperatures in excess of 300 MeV. Those same results indicate that the quark gluon plasma produced at RHIC is strongly coupled with a viscosity to entropy ratio of the same order as a (AdS/CFT) conjectured lower bound. Measurements of high transverse particle production indicates strong "quenching" of jets in the quark gluon plasma and a strong medium response to the passage of those jets. Measurements of meson and baryon transverse momentum spectra suggest a surprisingly simple picture in which hadrons are produced via the statistical recombination of quarks from the quark gluon plasma. The results that form the basis for these interpretations and the the interpretations themselves will be critically reviewed. Possible tests of current interpretations of RHIC data using future RHIC measurements and measurements at the LHC will be discussed.
Author
Brian Cole
(Physics Dept., Pupin Physics Lab.-Columbia University-Unknown)
