Related papers: Critical examination of RHIC paradigms-mostly high…
Lectures discuss applications of semiclassical methods based on instantons to vacuum structure (chiral symmetry breaking), hadronic structure (various correlation functions), and high energy collisions of hadrons and heavy ions. We discuss…
There is significant interest in RHIC heavy ion collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=$5--50 GeV, motivated by a search for the QCD phase transition critical point. The lowest energies for this search are well below the nominal RHIC gold injection…
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…
The exploration of the fundamental structure of strongly interacting matter has always thrived on the complementarity of lepton scattering and purely hadronic probes. As the community eagerly anticipates a future electron ion collider (EIC)…
With the energy scales opened up by RHIC and LHC the age of high-pT physics is upon us. This has created new opportunities and novel mysteries, both of which will be explored in this thesis. The possibility now exists experimentally to…
Ultra-peripheral collisions (UPCs) of ions allow us to study photonuclear and two-photon interactions at energies above those available at fixed target accelerators. For heavy ions, the couplings are large enough so that multi-photon…
The inclusive spectra so far accumulated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at energies of $\sqrt{s} = 56, 130$ and 200 GeV are examined within the hadronic simulation LUCIFER. What emerges at this juncture is a comprehensive and…
We analyze the contribution of pQCD based semi-hard parton (re)scattering to the reaction dynamics of relativistic heavy-ion collisions at SPS and RHIC. While such processes are able to account for the measured yield of high momentum direct…
We describe the current status of the heavy ion research program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The new suite of experiments and the collider energies have opened up new probes of the medium created in the collisions. Our…
In the initial years of operation, experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have identified a new form of matter formed in nuclei-nuclei collisions at energy densities more than 100 times that of a cold atomic nucleus.…
We utilize a 3D hybrid hydro+micro model for a comprehensive and consistent description of soft and hard particle production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. In the soft sector we focus on the dynamics of (multi-)strange…
Using the theory talks at ISMD2010 as a guidance, I present a personal review of our current understanding of multiparticle interactions in QCD. For more clarity, I separately consider hard, semi-hard, and soft interactions, and I devote…
The recent results on relativistic heavy-ion collisions are discussed. The most convincing quark-gluon plasma signatures at the LHC and the top RHIC energies are presented. Moreover, the possible methods of evaluating the energy threshold…
The QCD phase diagram lies at the heart of what the RHIC Physics Program is all about. While RHIC has been operating very successfully at or close to its maximum energy for almost a decade, it has become clear that this collider can also be…
The search for a possible critical point in the QCD phase diagram is ongoing in heavy ion collision experiments at RHIC which scan the phase diagram by scanning the beam energy; a coming upgrade will increase the luminosity and extend the…
The results from data taken during the last several years at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) will be reviewed in the paper. Several selected topics that further our understanding of constituent quark scaling, jet quenching and…
Hot QCD physics studies the nuclear strong force under extreme temperature and densities. Experimentally these conditions are achieved via high-energy collisions of heavy ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large…
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…
The first decade of RHIC running has established the existence of a strongly coupled Quark Gluon Plasma (sQGP), a new state of nuclear matter with partonic degrees of freedom. Theory predicts how transitions to this sQGP depend on the…
High-pT particle production is suppressed in heavy ion collisions due to parton energy loss in dense QCD matter. Here we present a systematic comparison of two different theoretical approximations to parton energy loss calculations: the…