Related papers: Exploring the QCD landscape with high-energy nucle…
We study the QCD phase diagram, in particular we study the critical points of the two main QCD phase transitions, confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. Confinement drives chiral symmetry breaking, and, due to the finite quark mass, at…
We provide a concise review on recent theory advancements towards full-fledged (3+1)D dynamical descriptions of relativistic nuclear collisions at finite baryon density. Heavy-ion collisions at different collision energies produce…
This is an introduction to the use of nonperturbative flow equations in strong interaction physics at nonzero temperature and baryon density. We investigate the QCD phase diagram as a function of temperature, chemical potential for baryon…
These lectures provide a modern introduction to selected topics in the physics of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions which shed light on the fundamental theory of strong interactions, the Quantum Chromodynamics. The emphasis is on the…
We address the flavour composition along the border between the hadronic and the quark-gluon plasma phases of QCD. The ratio of strange to up and down antiquarks ($\lambda_s$) produced in partic le and nuclear collisions, is found to…
We consider thermal QCD in the large N_C limit, mainly in 1+1 dimensions. The gauge coupling is only taken into account to minimal order, by projection onto colour singlets. An expression for the free energy, exact as N_C goes to infinity,…
Recently we have made considerable progress in our understanding of the behavior of QCD in extreme conditions of high temperature or large baryon number density. Among the highlights are the prediction of a well-characterized true critical…
The theory of confinement and deconfinement is discussed as based on the properties of the QCD vacuum. The latter are described by field correlators of colour-electric and colour-magnetic fields in the vacuum, which can be calculated…
I review recent developments in finite temperature lattice QCD which are useful for the study of heavy-ion collisions. I pay particular attention to studies of the equation of state and the light they throw on conformal symmetry and the…
Substantial experimental and theoretical efforts worldwide are devoted to explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter. At LHC and top RHIC energies, QCD matter is studied at very high temperatures and nearly vanishing…
Nuclei make up the majority of the visible matter in the Universe; obtaining a first principles description of the nuclear properties and interactions between nuclei directly from the underlying theory of the strong interaction, Quantum…
We compute derivatives of thermodynamic quantities with respect to $\mu$, at $\mu=0$ for 2 and 3 flavors of degenerate quark masses. This allows us to estimate the phase transition line in the $T,\mu$ plane and quantify the influence of a…
Many new particles, mostly hadrons, are produced in high energy collisions between atomic nuclei. The most popular models describing the hadron production process are based on the creation, evolution and decay of resonances, strings or…
The application of Riemannian geometry to the analysis of the equilibrium thermodynamics in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at finite temperature and baryon density gives a new method to evaluate the critical temperature, $T_c$, of the…
We compute the QCD phase diagram in the plane of the chiral chemical potential and temperature using the linear sigma model coupled to quarks and to the Polyakov loop. The chiral chemical potential accounts for effects of imbalanced…
The finite nuclear thickness affects the energy density $\epsilon(t)$ and conserved-charge densities such as the net-baryon density $n_B(t)$ produced in heavy ion collisions. While the effect is small at high collision energies where the…
We summarize our recent results on the phase diagram of QCD with N_f=2+1 quark flavors, as a function of temperature T and quark chemical potential \mu. Using staggered fermions, lattices with temporal extent N_t=4, and the exact RHMC…
We review recent developments on the QCD phase diagram at small chemical potentials and increasing temperature. There are three regimes/phases in QCD which differ by symmetries, degrees of freedom and N_c scaling: the hadron gas below the…
This contribution presents a brief summary of the recent past efforts to experimentally explore the QCD phase diagram at high baryon chemical potentials through heavy-ion collisions. A few measurements are highlighted to present the current…
The critical sector of strong interactions at high temperatures is explored in the frame of two complementary paradigms: Statistical Bootstrap for the hadronic phase and Lattice QCD for the Quark-Gluon partition function. A region of…