Brief history of the search for critical structures in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The paper briefly presents history, status, and plans of the search for the critical structures - the onset of fireball, the onset of deconfinement, and the deconfinement critical point - in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. First, the basic ideas are introduced, the history of the observation of strongly interacting matter in heavy ion collisions is reviewed, and the path towards the quark-gluon plasma discovery is sketched. Then the status of the search for critical structures is discussed - the discovery of the onset of deconfinement, indications for the onset of fireball, and still inconclusive results concerning the deconfinement critical point. Finally, an attempt to formulate priorities for future measurements - charm quarks vs the onset of deconfinement and detailed study of the onset of fireball - closes the paper.

38 pages, 17 figures

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• Evidence for the production of thermal muon pairs with masses above 1 GeV/c^2 in 158A GeV Indium-Indium Collisions
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Modeling Strangeness Enhancements to resolve the Muon Excess in Cosmic Ray Extensive Air Shower Data
• Chiral phase transition and kaon-to-pion ratios in the entanglement SU(3) PNJL model
• Eliminating $volume$ fluctuations in fixed-target heavy-ion experiments
• Low mu and imaginary mu signals of a critical point in the phase diagram of an exactly soluble chiral symmetry breaking theory
• Mott dissociation and kaon to pion ratio in the EPNJL model