From SPS to RHIC: Maurice and the CERN heavy-ion programme

Abstract

Maurice Jacob played a key role in bringing together different groups from the experimental and theoretical nuclear and particle physics communities to initiate an ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collision program at the CERN SPS, in order to search for the quark-gluon plasma. I review the history of this program from its beginnings to the time when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) started operation. I close by providing a glimpse of the important discoveries made at RHIC and giving an outlook towards heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). During Maurice's life and not least through his perpetually strong influence, relativistic heavy-ion physics has matured and led to discoveries that radiate into many other fields of physics. Heavy-ion physicists owe a great deal to Maurice Jacob.

12 pages, including 2 Figs. Invited talk given at the "Maurice Jacob Memorial Meeting", CERN, 11 September 2007. To appear in a special issue of Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics which is published as a Section of Physica Scripta

References in corpus (5)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• Viscosity Information from Relativistic Nuclear Collisions: How Perfect is the Fluid Observed at RHIC?
• Suppression of elliptic flow in a minimally viscous quark-gluon plasma
• Scaling properties of azimuthal anisotropy in Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• The Shear Viscosity to Entropy Density Ratio of Trapped Fermions in the Unitarity Limit