The QCD Critical Point and Heavy-ion Collisions

by Misha Stephanov (UIC)

Wednesday 17 Aug 2016, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

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

Is there a critical point in QCD on the boundary between quark-gluon plasma and hadron gas phases? Heavy-ion collision experiments could answer this question. Universality makes certain aspects of the physics near the QCD critical point similar to the critical phenomena in ordinary non-relativistic fluids. A crucial practical difference is the importance of non-equilibrium effects in heavy-ion collisions, which bear similarities to non-equilibrium phenomena in cosmology.