From SPS to RHIC: Breaking the Barrier to the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

After 15 years of heavy-ion collision experiments at the AGS and SPS, the recent turn-on of RHIC has initiated a new stage of quark-gluon plasma studies. I review the evidence for deconfined quark-gluon matter at SPS energies and the recent confirmation of some of the key ideas by the new RHIC data. Measurements of the elliptic flow at RHIC provide strong evidence for efficient thermalization during the very early partonic collision stage, resulting in a well-developed quark-gluon plasma with almost ideal fluid-dynamical collective behaviour and a lifetime of several fm/c.

LaTex 12 pages, including 6 figures. Opening talk at the Conference "QCD@work", Martinafranca (Bari), June 16-20, 2001

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Plasma-balls in large N gauge theories and localized black holes
• The first second of the Universe
• Relativistic anisotropic hydrodynamics
• Anisotropic hydrodynamic modeling of 200 GeV Au-Au collisions
• Vacuum creation of quarks at the time scale of QGP thermalization and strangeness enhancement in heavy-ion collisions
• Anomaly Matching and Low Energy Theories at High Matter Density
• Aspects of the Quantum Chromo Dynamics Phase Diagram
• Exploring hadron-quark phase transition in heavy-ion collisions using particle emission ratios in heavy and light reaction systems