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 (8)

• Theory of ultracold Fermi gases
• Color superconductivity in dense quark matter
• Dilepton Radiation at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron
• 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
• Exploring the QCD phase diagram
• Do we know eventually p(e)?

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Performance of the ALICE Experiment at the CERN LHC
• Thermal hadron production in relativistic nuclear collisions: the hadron mass spectrum, the horn, and the QCD phase transition
• Production of light nuclei, hypernuclei and their antiparticles in relativistic nuclear collisions
• The horn, the hadron mass spectrum and the QCD phase diagram - the statistical model of hadron production in central nucleus-nucleus collisions
• Transverse momentum distributions of charmonium states with the statistical hadronization model
• The Chiral Restoration Transition of QCD and Low Mass Dileptons
• Statistical hadronization of heavy flavor quarks in elementary collisions: successes and failures
• First measurement of quarkonium polarization in nuclear collisions at the LHC
• Thermal hadron production in relativistic nuclear collisions
• Heavy Quark Diffusion as a Probe of the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Spontaneous magnetization in QCD and non-Fermi-liquid effects
• Collective Phenomena in the Non-Equilibrium Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Overview of ALICE results
• Conformal perturbation theory confronts lattice results in the vicinity of a critical point
• Thermal nature of charmonium transverse momentum spectra from Au-Au collisions at the highest energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)
• Phases of hot and dense QCD matter
• Dual Methods for Lattice Field Theories at Finite Density
• Influence of modified light-flavor hadron spectra on particle yields in the statistical hadronization model
• Future perspectives at SIS-100 with HADES-at-FAIR
• Pion Condensation in a two-flavor NJL model: the role of charge neutrality
• Heavy ion collisions: puzzles and hopes