Accessing the Space-Time Development of Heavy-Ion Collisions With Theory And Experiment

Abstract

This thesis describes two lines of work. The first line is a study of the application of transport theory to massless particles, such as the partons in an ultrarelativistic collision at RHIC. The second line of work is an application of imaging techniques to extract the relative distribution of emission points from two-particle correlation functions measured in heavy-ion reactions. This thesis contains an introduction to transport theory and intensity interferometry as well as updates to several papers. These papers are D.A. Brown and P. Danielewicz, "Partons in Phase-Space," Phys. Rev. D 58 (1998) article no. 094003 (eprint nucl-th/9802015), D.A. Brown and P. Danielewicz, "Imaging of Sources in Heavy-Ion Reactions," Phys. Lett. B 398 (1997) pp. 252-258 (eprint nucl-th/9701010), and D.A. Brown and P. Danielewicz, "Optimized Discretization of Sources Imaged in Heavy-Ion Reactions," Phys. Rev. C 57 (1998) pp. 2474-2483 (eprint nucl-th/9712066).

arXiv commentPh.D. Thesis, 247 pages, 39+ figures, uses msuthesis_98.cls (included). Postscript file available from http://www.pa.msu.edu/~brown_a/dave-thesis.ps.gz

References in corpus (22)

• Construction of high-quality Nucleon-Nucleon potential models
• The physics of Hanbury Brown--Twiss intensity interferometry: from stars to nuclear collisions
• Effects of Compression and Collective Expansion on Particle Emission from Central Heavy-Ion Reactions
• The Phase Transition to the Quark-Gluon Plasma and Its Effect on Hydrodynamic Flow
• Imaging of Sources in Heavy-Ion Reactions
• Relativistic Quantum Transport Theory for Electrodynamics
• Transverse Energy and Forward Jet Production in the Low $x$ Regime at HERA
• Optimized Discretization of Sources Imaged in Heavy-Ion Reactions
• Probability and Measurement Uncertainty in Physics - a Bayesian Primer
• Causality Violations in Cascade Models of Nuclear Collisions
• Are we close to the QGP? - Hadrochemical vs. microscopic analysis of particle production in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions
• Quantum Field Kinetics of QCD: Quark-Gluon Transport Theory for Lightcone Dominated Processes
• Testing the Core-Halo Model on Bose-Einstein Correlation Functions
• Derivation of transport equations for a strongly interacting Lagrangian in powers of $\hslash$ and $1/N_c$
• Quark Gluon Plasma from Numerical Simulations of Lattice QCD
• Scenario for Ultrarelativistic Nuclear Collisions: Space--Time Picture of Quantum Fluctuations and the Birth of QGP
• Quark and gluon distributions at the earliest stage of heavy ion collision
• Quantum Field Kinetics
• Wee partons in large nuclei: from virtual dream to hard reality
• Thermalization of a Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Spurious poles of the axial gauge propagators and dynamics of the interacting fields
• Towards a Quantum Transport Description of Particles with finite Mass Width