Toward the Limits of Matter: Ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions at CERN

Abstract

Strongly interacting matter as described by the thermodynamics of QCD undergoes a phase transition, from a low temperature hadronic medium to a high temperature quark-gluon plasma state. In the early universe this transition occurred during the early microsecond era. It can be investigated in the laboratory, in collisions of nuclei at relativistic energy, which create "fireballs" of sufficient energy density to cross the QCD Phase boundary. We describe 3 decades of work at CERN, devoted to the study of the QCD plasma and the phase transition. From modest beginnings at the SPS, ultra-relativistic heavy ion physics has evolved today into a central pillar of contemporary nuclear physics and forms a significant part of the LHC program.

To appear in "60 Years of CERN Experiments and Discoveries", Editors H. Schopper and L. di Lella, World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 2015

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• QM2017: Status and Key open Questions in Ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Physics
• Critical exponents of finite temperature chiral phase transition in soft-wall AdS/QCD models
• Collective dynamics of polarized spin-half fermions in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Heavy-ion physics at the CERN SPS H2: NA35, NA49 and NA61/SHINE (with personal recollections)