Quark Matter and Nuclear Collisions: A Brief History of Strong Interaction Thermodynamics

Abstract

The past fifty years have seen the emergence of a new field of research in physics, the study of matter at extreme temperatures and densities. The theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), predicts that in this limit, matter will become a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons -- the medium which made up the early universe in the first 10 microseconds after the big bang. High energy nuclear collisions are expected to produce short-lived bubbles of such a medium in the laboratory. I survey the merger of statistical QCD and nuclear collision studies for the analysis of strongly interacting matter in theory and experiment.

24 pages, 14 figures Opening Talk at the 5th Berkeley School on Collective Dynamics in High Energy Collisions, LBNL Berkeley/California, May 14 - 18, 2012

References in corpus (4)

• Dihadron azimuthal correlations in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV
• Real and imaginary-time $Q\bar{Q}$ correlators in a thermal medium
• Thermal Hadronization and Hawking-Unruh Radiation in QCD
• The Thermal Production of Strange and Non-Strange Hadrons in e+e- Collisions

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Systematic properties of the Tsallis Distribution: Energy Dependence of Parameters in High-Energy p-p Collisions
• Centrality dependence of hadronization and chemical freeze-out conditions in heavy ion collisions at \sqrt s_{NN} = 2.76 TeV
• Equilibrium Statistical-Thermal Models in High-Energy Physics
• Self-similarity in jet events following from p-p collisions at LHC
• Particle production in Ultra-relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions : A Statistical-Thermal Model Review
• Some intriguing aspects of multiparticle production processes
• Suppression of bottomonia states in finite size quark gluon plasma in PbPb collisions at Large Hadron Collider
• Strongly Interacting Matter at Finite Chemical Potential : Hybrid Model Approach
• Investigating the QCD phase diagram with hadron multiplicities at NICA
• Particle Production at CBM in a Thermal Model Approach
• Charmonium production in pp, p+Pb and Pb+Pb collisions with CMS experiment