The Search for the QGP: A Critical Appraisal

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, an extensive program of high energy nuclear collisions at BNL and CERN has been devoted to the experimental search for the quark-gluon plasma predicted by QCD. The start of RHIC this year will increase the highest available collision energy by a factor 10. This seems a good time for a critical assessment: what have we learned so far and what can we hope to learn in the coming years?

20 pages, 20 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Colour Deconfinement in Nuclear Collisions
• Thermal Dilepton Radiation at Intermediate Masses at the CERN-SpS
• Lattice QCD at Finite Temperature and Density
• Recent results from Pb-Au collisions at 158 GeV/c per nucleon obtained with the CERES spectrometer
• Will relativistic heavy-ion colliders destroy our planet?
• The Onset of Deconfinement in Nuclear Collisions

Cited by in corpus (14)

• High-p_T pion and kaon production in relativistic nuclear collisions
• A comparative analysis of statistical hadron production
• The Thermal Production of Strange and Non-Strange Hadrons in e+e- Collisions
• Responses of hadrons to chemical potential at finite temperature
• Intrinsic Broadening of the Transverse Momentum Spectra in Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions?
• What is the meaning of the statistical hadronization model?
• Statistical hadronization with exclusive channels in e+e- annihilation
• K*0 and phi Meson Production in Proton-Nucleus Interactions at sqrt(s) = 41.6 GeV
• Composite Reweighting the Glasgow Method for Finite Density QCD
• Threshold effects in relativistic gases
• Screening mass responses to the chemical potential at finite temperature
• The effect of single-particle space-momentum angle distribution on two-pion HBT correlation in high-energy heavy-ion collisions
• The effect of single-particle space-momentum angle distribution on two-pion HBT correlation in relativistic heavy-ion collisions by using a multiphase transport model
• Quantum Entanglement in Top Quark Pair Production