Strangeness and Quark--Gluon Plasma

Abstract

I review the foundational motivation which led us to the ultra relativistic heavy ion collision research at SPS, RHIC and now LHC: the quantum vacuum structure; the deconfined nature of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase filling the Universe for the first 30$\mu$s after the big-bang; the origin of stable matter mass; and of the origin of flavor. The special role of strangeness enhancement and strange antibaryon signature is highlighted. It is shown how hadron production can be used to determine the properties of QGP, and how the threshold energy for QGP formation is determined.

Jubilee Lecture at SQM2011 in Krakow, Poland to appear in Acta Physica Polonica B

References in corpus (1)

• Strangeness Enhancement: Challenges and Successes

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Strangeness at high temperatures: from hadrons to quarks
• Explanation of hadron transverse-momentum spectra in heavy-ion collisions at sqrt(sNN) = 2.76 TeV within chemical non-equilibrium statistical hadronization model
• Electromagnetic signal of the QCD phase transition in neutron star mergers
• Quarkyonic Percolation and deconfinement at finite density and number of colors