Advances in Quark Gluon Plasma

Abstract

In the last 20 years, heavy-ion collisions have been a unique way to study the hadronic matter in the laboratory. Its phase diagram remains unknown, although many experimental and theoretical studies have been undertaken in the last decades. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL was the first ever built heavy-ion collider. RHIC delivered its first collisions in June 2000 boosting the heavy-ion community. Impressive amount of experimental results has been obtained. In November 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN delivered lead-lead collisions at unprecedented center-of-mass energies, 14 times larger than that at RHIC. Needless to say that the heavy-ion programs at RHIC and LHC promise fascinating and exciting results in the next decade. In the second part, a historical approach will be adopted, starting with the notion of limiting temperature of matter introduced by Hagedorn in the 60's and the discovery of the QCD asymptotic freedom in the 70's. The phase diagram of hadronic matter, conceived as nowadays, will be shown together with the most important predictions of lattice QCD calculations at finite temperature. In the third part, the heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies will be proposed as a unique experimental method to study QGP in the laboratory, as suggested by the Bjorken model. In the last part of these lectures, I will present my biased review of the numerous experimental results obtained in the last decade at RHIC which lead to the concept of strong interacting QGP, and the first results obtained at LHC with the 2010 and 2011 PbPb runs. Finally, the last section is devoted to refer to other lectures about quark gluon plasma and heavy ion physics.

Proceedings of the 2011 Joliot Curie School (http://ejc2011.sciencesconf.org/) September 12-17th 2011, La Colle sur Loup, France, 42 pages, 19 figures

References in corpus (14)

• 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 Condensed Matter Physics of QCD
• Observation of sequential Upsilon suppression in PbPb collisions
• Relativistic hydrodynamics for heavy-ion collisions
• Observation of the antimatter helium-4 nucleus
• Measurement of Direct Photons in pp and Pb-Pb Collisions with ALICE
• Energy dependence of particle multiplicities in central Au+Au collisions
• Energy dependence of directed flow over a wide range of pseudorapidity in Au+Au collisions at RHIC
• Observation of Two-source Interference in the Photoproduction Reaction $AuAu\to AuAu{\rho }^0$
• Ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions and the quark-gluon plasma
• The Color Glass Condensate and Small x Physics: 4 Lectures
• Studies of di-jet survival and surface emission bias in Au+Au collisions via angular correlations with respect to back-to-back leading hadrons
• Charmonia production in ALICE

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Transverse energy production and charged-particle multiplicity at midrapidity in various systems from $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7$ to 200 GeV
• Phase Diagram in Quantum Chromodynamics
• Gravitational mechanism for baryogenesis in the cosmological QCD phase transition
• A comparative study of different approaches for heavy quark energy loss, based on the latest experimental data