Heavy Ion Forum - The Ten Year Anniversary

Friday 2 Mar 2007, 10:30 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

We celebrate the first 10 years of the HIF seminar serie with three talks:

1. 10:30-11:15 Hard Probes in Heavy Ion Collisions
   Nestor Armesto, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain
   
   The status of hard processes as probes of the medium created in an ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision, will be reviewed. I will show the main experimental facts, together with some proposed explanations. I will briefly discuss control processes - photons and dileptons, and then turn to high transverse momentum particles and quarkonium.
   
   


2. 11:30 - 12:30 The perfect black ink: The quark-gluon plasma as seen at RHIC
   Berndt Mueller, Physics Department, DUKE University, USA
   
   My lecture will describe what is now known about the properties of strongly interacting matter at the highest accessible energy densities from experiments. The important pieces of evidence include: strong collective flow, strong quenching of jets, and characteristic differences in the emission features of mesons and baryons. The matter produced in nuclear collisions reveals itself as a nearly inviscid fluid of extreme SU(3)-color opaqueness. I will also discuss some of the main open questions for future experimental and theoretical studies.
   
   


3. 14:00-15:00 The Color Glass Condensate and the Glasma
   
   Larry McLerran, Nuclear Theory Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA
   
   I argue that the high energy limit of QCD is controlled by high energy density gluonic matter characterized by high occupation number per state. This is the Color Glass Condensate, and can be thought of as an ensemble of strong transverse classical and electromagnetic fields. Almost instantaneously after a collision, these fields change to purely longitudinal electric and magnetic fields which are independent of rapidity. This Glasma carries topological charge, and generates chiral symmetry breaking. The fields are unstable under small rapidity dependent fluctuations generated by the field theoretical wavefunction at the initial singularity associated with the collision. Eventually these fields decay into gluons, and perhaps thermalize into a Quark Gluon Plasma.
   I show the correspondence of the 'Little Bang' of hadronic collisions with Big Bang cosmology. I also present some speculations that the distribution of Color Glass Condensate density fluctuations may be generated by two dimensional gravity.
   
   [This talk is jointly organized with the 'Meeting on Particle Physics Phenomenology']
   
   

Organiser(s): Carlos Salgado, François Arleo, Yiota Foka and Urs Wiedemann
More information: http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/static/HIF/welcome.html

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