Highlights from Heavy Ion Collisions at RHIC and the Acoustics of the Little Bangs

Abstract

At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, heavy nuclei are collided at high energies to create matter that is hot enough and dense enough to dissolve hadrons into a quark-gluon-plasma (QGP). In this lecture, dedicated to the memory of Aditya Sambamurti, I present an introduction to heavy-ion collisions and highlights from the first decade of RHIC results.

This is the write-up of the talk given for the 2011 Sambamurti Memorial Lecture at Brookhaven National Laboratory: http://www.phy.bnl.gov/edg/sambamurti.html

References in corpus (12)

• The order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics
• Glauber Modeling in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Higher harmonic anisotropic flow measurements of charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV
• Measurements of Higher-Order Flow Harmonics in Au+Au Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• Anomalous centrality evolution of two-particle angular correlations from Au-Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 62 and 200 GeV
• Measurement of elliptic and higher order flow from ATLAS experiment at the LHC
• The Fluid Nature of Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Resonance Recombination Model and Quark Distribution Functions in the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Analyzing the Power Spectrum of the Little Bangs
• The Sound of the Little Bangs
• From Quark-Gluon Plasma to the Perfect Liquid
• Untriggered di-hadron correlations in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=$ 2.76 TeV from ALICE