Speaker
Mr
Ulrich Heinz
(The Ohio State University)
Description
Heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) produce
an extremely hot and dense, but shortlived state of thermalized, strongly
interacting matter, the quark-gluon plasma. The discoveries of strong
anisotropic collective flow in the soft particle sector, strong
suppression of high-pt particles and of jet-like correlations in the hard
sector, and of a quark-coalescence pattern for hadron production at
intermediate transverse momenta have provided compelling qualitative
evidence for the formation of thermalized partonic matter which evolves
like an almost perfect liquid, without constraints from color confinement,
that is strongly coupled and extremely opaque to hard colored probes, and
that reacts collectively to the energy deposited by such probes. I will
describe the second stage of RHIC experiments and theoretical developments
that aim to turn these qualitative discoveries into quantitative
statements about the properties (initial temperature, shear and bulk
viscosity, jet quenching parameter, etc.) of the Quark-Gluon Plasma,
pointing out similarities and complementarities to the impending heavy-ion
program at the LHC.
Primary author
Mr
Ulrich Heinz
(The Ohio State University)
