A critical review of RHIC experimental results

Abstract

The relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) was constructed to achieve an asymptotic state of nuclear matter in heavy ion collisions, a near-ideal gas of deconfined quarks and gluons denoted quark-gluon plasma or QGP. RHIC collisions are indeed very different from the hadronic processes observed at the Bevalac and AGS, but high-energy elementary-collision mechanisms are also non-hadronic. The two-component model (TCM) combines measured properties of elementary collisions with the Glauber eikonal model to provide an alternative asymptotic limit for A-A collisions. RHIC data have been interpreted to indicate formation of a {\em strongly-coupled} QGP or "perfect liquid". In this review I consider the experimental evidence that seems to support such conclusions and alternative evidence that may conflict with those conclusions and suggest different interpretations.

30 pages, 37 figures, invited review for Advances in High Energy Physics

References in corpus (25)

• Viscosity Information from Relativistic Nuclear Collisions: How Perfect is the Fluid Observed at RHIC?
• Systematic Measurements of Identified Particle Spectra in pp, d+Au and Au+Au Collisions from STAR
• Scaling properties of azimuthal anisotropy in Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• Dihadron azimuthal correlations in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV
• Phobos results on charged particle multiplicity and pseudorapidity distributions in Au+Au, Cu+Cu, d+Au, and p+p collisions at ultra-relativistic energies
• Centrality dependence of charged hadron and strange hadron elliptic flow from sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV Au+Au collisions
• Inclusive charged hadron elliptic flow in Au + Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 7.7 - 39 GeV
• Long Range Correlations and the Soft Ridge in Relativistic Nuclear Collisions
• Quantitative Constraints on the Transport Properties of Hot Partonic Matter from Semi-Inclusive Single High Transverse Momentum Pion Suppression in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• A Detailed Study of High-pT Neutral Pion Suppression and Azimuthal Anisotropy in Au+Au Collisions at \sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200 GeV
• The multiplicity dependence of inclusive $p_t$ spectra from p-p collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 200 GeV
• K/pi Fluctuations at Relativistic Energies
• Scaling properties at freeze-out in relativistic heavy ion collisions
• Azimuthal Asymmetry of pions in pp and pA collisions
• Evolution of minimum-bias parton fragmentation in nuclear collisions
• Centrality evolution of $p_t$ and $y_t$ spectra from Au-Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV
• Extrapolating parton fragmentation to low $Q^2$ in $e^{+}$-$e^{-}$ collisions
• Parton fragment yields derived from minimum-bias jet angular correlations
• Measurement of density correlations in pseudorapidity via charged particle multiplicity fluctuations in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV
• Azimuth quadrupole component spectra on transverse rapidity ${\mathbf{y}}_{\mathbf{t}}$ for identified hadrons from Au-Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=$ 200 GeV
• The RHIC azimuth quadrupole: "perfect liquid" or gluonic radiation?
• The azimuth structure of nuclear collisions -- I
• Dijet production, collision centrality and backgrounds in high-energy p-p collisions
• Azimuth Quadrupole Systematics in Au-Au Collisions
• On the presence of nonjet "higher harmonic" components in 2D angular correlations from high energy heavy ion collisions

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Science of the Einstein Telescope
• Quantum algorithms for transport coefficients in gauge theories
• Gluon Dynamics, Center Symmetry and the deconfinement phase transition in SU(3) pure Yang-Mills theory
• Phenomenological models of two-particle correlation distributions on transverse momentum in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Finite temperature gluon propagator in Landau gauge: non-zero Matsubara frequencies and spectral densities
• Gluons at finite temperature
• Optimal modeling of 1D azimuth correlations in the context of Bayesian inference