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In heavy-ion collisions at relativistic energies, the incident nuclei travel at nearly the speed of light. These collisions deposit kinetic energy into the overlap region and create a high-temperature environment where hadrons ``melt'' into…
Particle production mechanisms in proton+proton and heavy-ion collisions at the LHC energies are discussed. An attempt is made to connect p+p to heavy-ion collisions in understanding the final state observables. New emerging phenomena like…
We give a pedagogical introduction (suitable to upper level physics undergraduates) to the field of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. We pay particular attention to our understanding of the thermodynamic and hydrodynamic properties of…
Heavy-ion collisions provide the only laboratory tests of relativistic quantum field theory at finite temperature. Understanding these is a necessary step in understanding the origins of our universe. These lectures introduce the subject to…
I discuss strangeness production in nucleus-nucleus reactions at ultrarelativistic energies (up to 200 AGeV). In these reactions matter may be created with densities and temperatures in the transition region between quark-gluon plasma (QGP)…
Thermalization is the dynamical process by which a many-body system evolves toward a thermal equilibrium state that maximizes its entropy. In certain cases, however, the establishment of thermal equilibrium is significantly slowed down and…
Within a pQCD inspired kinetic parton cascade we simulate the space time evolution of gluons which are produced initially in a heavy ion collision at RHIC energy. The inelastic gluonic interactions $gg \leftrightarrow ggg$ do play an…
Collisions of atomic nuclei at relativistic velocities allow to recreate the conditions encountered in neutron stars or in the early universe micro-seconds after the Big Bang. These reactions are performed in today's largest accelerator…
Cosmology and particle physics are deeply interrelated. Among the common problems are dark energy, dark matter and baryon asymmetry of the Universe. We discuss these problems in general terms, and concentrate on several particular…
We review the quark coalescence model for hadronization in relativistic heavy ion collisions and show how it can explain the observed large baryon to meson ratio at intermediate transverse momentum and scaling of the elliptic flows of…
The onset of thermalization in heavy ion collisions in the weak coupling framework can be viewed as a transition from the initial state Color Glass Condensate dynamics, characterized by the energy density scaling like $\epsilon \sim 1/\tau$…
Correlations and fluctuations (the latter are directly related to the 2-particle correlations) is one of the important directions in analysis of heavy ion collisions. At the current stage of RHIC exploration, when the details matter,…
It is shown that a paradigm of classical statistical mechanics --- the thermalization of a Brownian particle --- has a low-dimensional, deterministic analogue: when a heavy, slow system is coupled to fast deterministic chaos, the resultant…
The prompt emission of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) is still an outstanding question in the study of these cataclysmic events. Part of what makes GRBs difficult to study is how unique each event seems to be. However, aggregating many GRB…
A brief review is presented of the status of the thermal model and chemical freeze-out in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Some interewsting aspects at lower energies are emphasized.
We consider the thermodynamics of the matter made up of equal number of neutrons and protons and of scalar dibaryons. They interact via the exchange of scalar and vector mesons. The interaction is taken into account in the mean field…
We discuss the temporal evolution of the pair plasma created in Gamma-Ray Burst sources. A particular attention is paid to the relaxation of the plasma into thermal equilibrium. We also discuss the connection between the dynamics of…
The standard picture of heavy-ion collisions includes a collective expansion. If the initial energy density in the collisions is lumpy, then a collective expansion can convert that spatial lumpiness into correlations between final-state…
The early stages of heavy ion collisions are dominated by high density systems of gluons that carry each a small fraction $x$ of the momenta of the colliding nucleons. A distinguishing feature of such systems is the phenomenon of…
The quark-gluon plasma produced by collisions between ultra-relativistic heavy nuclei is well described in the language of hydrodynamics. Non-central collisions are characterized by very large angular momentum, which in a fluid system…