The Hot QCD White Paper: Exploring the Phases of QCD at RHIC and the LHC

Abstract

The past decade has seen huge advances in experimental measurements made in heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and more recently at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These new data, in combination with theoretical advances from calculations made in a variety of frameworks, have led to a broad and deep knowledge of the properties of thermal QCD matter. Increasingly quantitative descriptions of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in these collisions have established that the QGP is a strongly coupled liquid with the lowest value of specific viscosity ever measured. However, much remains to be learned about the precise nature of the initial state from which this liquid forms, how its properties vary across its phase diagram and how, at a microscopic level, the collective properties of this liquid emerge from the interactions among the individual quarks and gluons that must be visible if the liquid is probed with sufficiently high resolution. This white paper, prepared by the Hot QCD Writing Group as part of the U.S. Long Range Plan for Nuclear Physics, reviews the recent progress in the field of hot QCD and outlines the scientific opportunities in the next decade for resolving the outstanding issues in the field.

110 pages, 33 figures, 429 references. Prepared as part of the U.S. Long-Range Plan for Nuclear Physics

References in corpus (4)

• Approach to equilibrium in weakly coupled nonabelian plasmas
• Picturing perturbative parton cascades in QCD matter
• Some remarks on Lefschetz thimbles and complex Langevin dynamics
• Exploring the phase diagram of QCD with complex Langevin simulations

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Multi-system Bayesian constraints on the transport coefficients of QCD matter
• Properties of the QCD Matter -- An Experimental Review of Selected Results from RHIC BES Program
• Relativistic nuclear collisions: Establishing a non-critical baseline for fluctuation measurements
• Foundations and Applications of Quantum Kinetic Theory
• Spectral functions and dynamic critical behavior of relativistic $Z_2$ theories
• Probing Strangeness Canonical Ensemble with $K^{-}$, $\varphi (1020)$ and ${\Xi }^{-}$ Production in Au+Au Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=3\mathrm{GeV}$
• Scaling and adiabaticity in a rapidly expanding gluon plasma
• Strongly-Interacting Ultralight Millicharged Particles
• Non-critical fluctuations of (net) charges and (net) protons from iEBE-VISHNU hybrid model
• Self-consistent $O(4)$ model spectral functions from analytically continued FRG flows
• New estimator for symmetry plane correlations in anisotropic flow analyses
• Exploring the properties of the phases of QCD matter - research opportunities and priorities for the next decade
• Influence of the vector interaction and an external magnetic field on the isentropes near the chiral critical end point
• Holography of Little Inflation
• Higher-Harmonic Collective Modes in a Trapped Gas from Second-Order Hydrodynamics
• Study of energy-momentum tensor correlation function in $N_f=2+1$ full QCD for QGP viscosities
• Dynamical energy loss formalism: from describing suppression patterns to implications for future experiments
• Density Functional Equation of State and Its Application to the Phenomenology of Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Effect of non-uniform efficiency on higher-order cumulants in heavy-ion collisions
• Global $\Lambda$-hyperon polarization in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=3$ GeV
• Light and strange hadron production and anisotropic flow measurement in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=3\mathrm{GeV}$ from STAR