Related papers: The RHIC Beam Energy Scan - STAR'S Perspective
We provide a description of the QCD phase diagram across different energy regimes. Without any adjustable free parameters fitted to lattice or experimental data, we demonstrate that the net-proton number cumulant ratios from the Beam Energy…
The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) studies properties and phase transitions of nuclear matter in various nucleus-nucleus collisions at center-of-mass energies per nucleon collision $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7$-200 GeV.…
One of the primary aims of heavy-ion collisions is to map the QCD phase diagram and search for different phases and phase boundaries. RHIC Energy Scan Program was launched to address this goal by studying heavy-ion collisions at different…
One of the key signatures of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) is the energy loss of high momentum particles as they traverse the strongly interacting medium. The energy loss of these particles is governed by the jet transport coefficient…
Potential near- and long-term physics opportunities with jets, heavy flavors and electromagnetic probes at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are presented. Much new physics remains to be unveiled using these probes, due to their…
Recently there was a significant change of views on physical properties and underlying dynamics of Quark-Gluon Plasma at $T=170-350 MeV$, produced in heavy ion collisions at RHIC. Instead of weakly coupled gas of quasiparticles, it is…
The proposed sPHENIX detector at RHIC is being designed to study with unprecedented precision the nature of the Quark Gluon Plasma, or QGP, at RHIC through measurement of jets, jet correlations, and Y particles. To reach the goal of…
We report the beam energy (\sqrt s_{NN} = 7.7 - 200 GeV) and collision centrality dependence of the mean (M), standard deviation (\sigma), skewness (S), and kurtosis (\kappa) of the net-proton multiplicity distributions in Au+Au collisions.…
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory is the first accelerator specifically constructed for the study of very hot and dense nuclear matter. At sufficiently high temperature, nuclear matter is…
We perform a study of electromagnetic radiation in heavy-ion collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) Beam Energy Scan (BES) and SPS energies using the iEBE-MUSIC framework, which includes 3D dynamical Monte Carlo Glauber…
In this review, we present an up-to-date phenomenological summary of research developments in the physics of the Quark--Gluon Plasma (QGP). A short historical perspective and theoretical motivation for this rapidly developing field of…
Location of critical point and mapping the QCD phase boundary still exists as one of the most interesting and studied problems of heavy-ion physics. A new equation of state (EOS) for a gas of extended baryons and pointlike mesons is…
I review arguments for the existence of a critical point in the QCD phase diagram as a function of temperature and baryon chemical potential. I describe how heavy ion collision experiments at the SPS and RHIC can discover the tell-tale…
Collisions of heavy nuclei at very high energies offer the exciting possibility of experimentally exploring the phase transformation from hadronic to partonic degrees of freedom which is predicted to occur at several times normal nuclear…
Enhanced fluctuations and correlations have been observed in the phase transitions of many systems. Their appearance at the predicted QCD phase transition (especially near the expected critical point) may provide insight into the nature of…
Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), defined on a discrete space time lattice, leads to a spectacular non-perturbative prediction of a new state of matter, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP), at sufficiently high temperatures or equivalently…
The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory is carrying out a spin physics program in high-energy polarized proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=200\,$GeV and $\sqrt{s}=500\,$GeV to gain a deeper…
In nucleus-nucleus collisions at relativistic energies a new kind of matter is created, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). The phase diagram of such matter and the chemical freeze-out points will be presented in connection to the pseudo-critical…
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) predicts that at sufficiently high temperature ($T$) and/or baryon chemical potential ($\mu_B$), the state of matter is in the form of quarks and gluons, which are no longer confined within hadrons. This…
The search for the critical point of QCD in heavy-ion collision experiments has sparked enormous interest with the completion of phase I of the RHIC beam energy scan. Here, I review the basics of the thermodynamics of the QCD phase…