Related papers: Recent Results from PHENIX Experiment at RHIC: Exp…
The ratio of nuclear modification factors of high-pT heavy-flavored mesons to light-flavored hadrons (``heavy-to-light ratio'') in nucleus-nucleus collisions tests the partonic mechanism expected to underlie jet quenching. Heavy-to-light…
In the past few years a wealth of high quality data has made possible to test current theoretical ideas about the properties of hadrons subject to extreme conditions of density and temperature. The relativistic heavy-ion program carried out…
I present a theory-guided review of RHIC data, arguing that they provide strong evidence for formation of a thermalized quark-gluon plasma at RHIC. Strong radial flow reflects high thermal pressure in the reaction zone. Large elliptic flow…
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…
Quarkonia provide a sensitive probe of the properties of the hot dense medium created in high energy heavy ion collisions. Hard scattering processes result in the production of heavy quark pairs that interact with the collision medium…
A fundamental goal in QCD is to understand the non-perturbative structure of hadrons at the amplitude level--not just the single-particle flavor, momentum, and helicity distributions of the quark constituents, but also the multi-quark,…
In this paper we provide a physical picture for the QCD phase transition in terms of qualitative changes in the spectral functions. Our approach takes into account the crossover nature of this transition and counts for the observed strong…
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…
Relativistic heavy ion physics studies the phenomena that occur when a very large (in units of QCD scale $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}$) amount of energy is deposited into a large (in units of $\Lambda^{-3}_{\rm QCD}$) volume, creating an extended in…
We review the progress achieved in extracting the properties of hot and dense matter from relativistic heavy ion collisions at the relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the large hadron collider (LHC)…
We introduce a combined fully three-dimensional macroscopic/microscopic transport approach employing relativistic 3D-hydrodynamics for the early, dense, deconfined stage of the reaction and a microscopic non-equilibrium model for the later…
Theoretical and experimental studies of hot and/or dense matter, such as is created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, and encountered in compact objects in astrophysics, constitute one of the most active frontiers in nuclear physics. In…
The polarized proton beams at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory provide a unique environment to observe hard scattering between gluons and quarks. The PHENIX experiment has recorded collisions at…
Understanding properties of QCD matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a major goal of RHIC and LHC experiments. An excellent tool to study these properties is jet suppression of light and heavy flavor observables.…
The novel Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach is applied to nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC energies with respect to differential hadronic spectra in comparison to available data. The PHSD approach is based on a…
The drag and diffusion coefficients of charm and bottom quarks propagating through quark gluon plasma (QGP) have been evaluated within the framework of perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD). Both radiative and collisional processes of…
The dynamics of partons, hadrons and strings in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions is analyzed within the novel Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach, which is based on a dynamical quasiparticle model for partons…
Medium modifications of the electromagnetic spectral function in hadronic and quark-gluon matter are reviewed. A strong broadening of the $\rho$ meson, which dominates the spectral function in the low-mass regime, is quantitatively…
The transverse momentum ($p_{\rm T}$) and centrality dependence of the azimuthal anisotropy ($v_{2}$) are measured for charged hadrons in different energies and collision species by the PHENIX experiment at RHIC. We find that $v_{2}$…
Heavy quark energy loss in a hot QCD plasma is computed taking into account the competing effects due to suppression of zeroth order gluon radiation bellow the plasma frequency and the enhancement of gluon radiation due to transition energy…