From Quark-Gluon Plasma to the Perfect Liquid

Abstract

After reviewing some basic concepts of the theory of strongly interacting matter above nuclear energy density and reviewing some salient results of the experimental program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), these lectures explain why the quark-gluon plasma observed in the RHIC experiments has been called a ``perfect liquid.'' They then give an introduction to some recent ideas concerning the possible origin of the nearly inviscid nature of the quark-gluon plasma and discuss the connection between low viscosity and strong parton energy loss of hot QCD matter.

Lectures presented at the Cracow School of Theoretical Physics, XLVII Course, Zakopane, Poland, 14--22 June 2007

References in corpus (3)

• Suppression of elliptic flow in a minimally viscous quark-gluon plasma
• Jet broadening in unstable non-Abelian plasmas
• Radiative jet energy loss in a three-dimensional hydrodynamical medium and high $p_T$ azimuthal asymmetry of ${\pi }_0$ suppression at mid and forward rapidity at RHIC

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Jet evolution in the N=4 SYM plasma at strong coupling
• Acceleration, Energy Loss and Screening in Strongly-Coupled Gauge Theories
• Lattice NRQCD study of S- and P-wave bottomonium states in a thermal medium with $N_f=2+1$ light flavors
• Inverse Anisotropic Catalysis in Holographic QCD
• Holographic Lessons for Quark Dynamics
• Plasma photoemission from string theory
• Plasma conductivity at finite coupling
• Partons and jets in a strongly-coupled plasma from AdS/CFT
• Nonzero Mean Squared Momentum of Quarks in the Non-Perturbative QCD Vacuum
• Search and study of Quark Gluon Plasma at the CERN-LHC
• The Emerging QCD Frontier: The Electron Ion Collider
• Acceleration and Energy Loss in N=4 SYM
• Parton saturation at strong coupling from AdS/CFT
• Highlights from Heavy Ion Collisions at RHIC and the Acoustics of the Little Bangs
• Soft-hadronic observables for relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC