Zimányi 2006 Winter School on Heavy Ion Physics

This school aims to summarize the developments in 2006 in high energy heavy ion physics, with particular attention to the recent Quark Matter conference in China as well as new data emerging from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) accelerator. This accelerator has been dedicated to collide intersecting beams of heavy ions in the search for a new state of matter called quark gluon plasma. Instead of a plasma, the 4 RHIC experiments reported the detection of a perfect fluid, which became the AIP Top Physics Story of 2005. Some of the more recent developments, aiming at determining the degrees of freedom in this liquid, and the possible relation to strongly coupled plasmas will be discussed at great details at our forthcoming school. Also we plan to discuss the characteristic signatures of a second order QCD phase transition and a cross-over quark-hadron transition. As usual, we plan to discuss in detail recent results and advances on correlations and fluctuations in high energy particle and heavy ion physics. Furthermore, we will discuss the preparation of the (Hungarian) heavy ion community for the forthcoming LHC accelerator and its experiments: 2006 is the last year before the onset of the LHC. Hungarian teams are preparing for participation in the ALICE, CMS and TOTEM experiments at LHC. Special colloqium will be delivered by professor Karsten Eggert, the Spokesman of the LHC experiment TOTEM. Please find below the final program of the meeting and the links to the presentations. The main web page of this meeting is archived at http://zimanyischool.kfki.hu/06/.