High Energy Nuclear Collisions: Theory Overview

Abstract

We review some basic concepts of Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics and discuss our understanding of some key results from the experimental program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). We focus in particular on the early time dynamics of nuclear collisions, some result from lattice QCD, hard probes and photons.

11 pages, 3 figures; delivered at ISNP 2009, published in Pramana

References in corpus (25)

• Experimental and Theoretical Challenges in the Search for the Quark Gluon Plasma: The STAR Collaboration's Critical Assessment of the Evidence from RHIC Collisions
• Formation of dense partonic matter in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC: Experimental evaluation by the PHENIX collaboration
• The effects of topological charge change in heavy ion collisions: "Event by event P and CP violation"
• New Forms of QCD Matter Discovered at RHIC
• The QCD transition temperature: results with physical masses in the continuum limit
• Fully quantum treatment of the Landau--Pomeranchuk--Migdal effect in QED and QCD
• Reaction Operator Approach to Non-Abelian Energy Loss
• Bottom-up thermalization in heavy ion collisions
• Multiple Parton Scattering in Nuclei: Parton Energy Loss
• Photon and Gluon Emission in Relativistic Plasmas
• Non-Abelian Energy Loss at Finite Opacity
• Some Features of the Glasma
• Multiple Scattering, Parton Energy Loss and Modified Fragmentation Functions in Deeply Inelastic eA Scattering
• Photon Emission from Ultrarelativistic Plasmas
• Jet Tomography of Hot and Cold Nuclear Matter
• Jet Quenching in Thin Quark-Gluon Plasmas I: Formalism
• High energy photons from passage of jets through quark gluon plasma
• A Dynamical Scaling Law for Jet Tomography
• Q-PYTHIA: a medium-modified implementation of final state radiation
• A Monte Carlo Model for 'Jet Quenching'
• A theory of jet shapes and cross sections: from hadrons to nuclei
• Azimuthal Asymmetry of Direct Photons in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Constraint fitting of experimental data with a jet quenching model embedded in a hydrodynamical bulk medium
• The electromagnetic signature of jets
• From 0 to 5000 in $2\times 10^{-24}$ seconds: Entropy production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions