Theory overview of Heavy Ion collisions

Abstract

This presentation discusses some recently active topics in the theoretical interpretation of high energy heavy ion collisions at the LHC and at RHIC. We argue that the standard paradigm for understanding the spacetime evolution of the bulk of the matter produced in the collision is provided by viscous relativistic hydrodynamics, which can be used to systematically extract properties of the QCD medium from experimental results. The initial conditions of this hydrodynamical evolution are increasingly well understood in terms of gluon saturation, and can be quantified using Classical Yang-Mills fields and QCD effective kinetic theory. Hard and electromagnetic probes of the plasma provide additional constraints. A particularly fascinating subject are high multiplicity proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions, where some of the characteristics previously attributed to only nucleus-nucleus collisions have been observed.

18 pages, 14 figures, presented at the Fourth Annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP2016), 13--18 June 2016, Lund, Sweden

References in corpus (14)

• Some Features of the Glasma
• Event-by-event gluon multiplicity, energy density and eccentricities at RHIC and LHC
• The ridge in proton-proton collisions at the LHC
• Antiangular Ordering of Gluon Radiation in QCD Media
• Q-PYTHIA: a medium-modified implementation of final state radiation
• Angular Correlations in Gluon Production at High Energy
• Mass ordering of spectra from fragmentation of saturated gluon states in high multiplicity proton-proton collisions
• High energy factorization in nucleus-nucleus collisions III. Long range rapidity correlations
• Parton shower evolution in a 3-d hydrodynamical medium
• Picturing perturbative parton cascades in QCD matter
• Angular structure of the in-medium QCD cascade
• Initial state angular asymmetries in high energy p+A collisions: spontaneous breaking of rotational symmetry by a color electric field and C-odd fluctuations
• Anisotropy of the semi-classical gluon field of a large nucleus at high energy
• Status and developments of event generators