The Phase Diagram of Strongly-Interacting Matter

Abstract

A fundamental question of physics is what ultimately happens to matter as it is heated or compressed. In the realm of very high temperature and density the fundamental degrees of freedom of the strong interaction, quarks and gluons, come into play and a transition from matter consisting of confined baryons and mesons to a state with 'liberated' quarks and gluons is expected. The study of the possible phases of strongly-interacting matter is at the focus of many research activities worldwide. In this article we discuss physical aspects of the phase diagram, its relation to the evolution of the early universe as well as the inner core of neutron stars. We also summarize recent progress in the experimental study of hadronic or quark-gluon matter under extreme conditions with ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions.

20 pages, Rev. Mod. Phys. Vol 81, (2009) 1031-1050

References in corpus (6)

• Color superconductivity in dense quark matter
• Study of dielectron production in C+C collisions at 1 AGeV
• Enhancement of the dielectron continuum in sqrt{s_NN} = 200 GeV Au+Au collisions
• Lepton-pair production in nuclear collisions - past, present, future
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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Heavy Quark Diffusion as a Probe of the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Collective Phenomena in the Non-Equilibrium Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Future perspectives at SIS-100 with HADES-at-FAIR