Related papers: Melting Hadrons, Boiling Quarks
Dielectrons from heavy flavor hadron decays not only constitute a crucial background to their thermal spectrum in high-energy nuclear collisions, from which the temperature of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is extracted, but also provide a…
We review the properties of the strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma (QGP) at finite temperature $T$ and baryon chemical potential $\mu_B$ as created in heavy-ion collisions at ultrarelativistic energies. The description of the strongly…
In the last 20 years, heavy-ion collisions have been a unique way to study the hadronic matter in the laboratory. Its phase diagram remains unknown, although many experimental and theoretical studies have been undertaken in the last…
It has been theorized that if heavy nuclei (e.g. Au, Pb) are collided at sufficiently high energies, we might be to recreate the conditions that existed in the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang. The kinetic energy of the…
The double phase transition of hadronic matter, $H$, first, to the gas of deconfined constituent quarks (for brevity called {\it valons}), $Q$, and then, secondly, the phase transition from $Q$ to quark-gluon plasma, $QGP$, is considered…
We analyze fluctuations of quark number and electric charge, in 2-flavour QCD at finite temperature and vanishing net baryon number density. In the hadronic phase we find that an enhancement of charge fluctuations arises from contributions…
Understanding the hadronization of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) remains a challenging problem in the study of strong-interaction matter as produced in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions (URHICs). The large mass of heavy quarks renders…
I review the three broad areas where major progress has been reported: The phase structure of strongly interacting matter, the properties of matter at the instant when it freezes out into individual hadrons in the final stage of the…
Open heavy flavor and quarkonia have long been identified as ideal probes for understanding the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Heavy quarks are produced in the early stage of the heavy-ion collisions. Therefore they experience the evolution of…
We compare lattice QCD results for appropriate combinations of net strangeness fluctuations and their correlations with net baryon number fluctuations with predictions from two hadron resonance gas (HRG) models having different strange…
I discuss the phase structure of strongly interacting matter at high temperatures and densities, as predicted by statistical QCD, and consider in particular the nature of the transition of hot hadronic matter to a plasma of deconfined…
Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, predicts a transition of the usual matter to a new phase of matter, called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), at sufficiently high temperatures. The non-perturbative technique 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…
At the quark-hadron transition, when quarks get confined to hadrons, certain orbitally excited states, namely those which have excitation energies above the respective $L = 0$ states of the same order as the transition temperature $T_c$,…
We discuss an outside-inside scenario for a first order quark-hadron transition in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) expected to be produced in heavy ion collisions, wherein the entire QGP region itself becomes like a subcritical bubble, and…
Extremely large angular orbital momentum can be produced in non-central heavy-ion collisions, leading to a strong transverse polarization of partons that scatter through the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) due to spin-orbital coupling. We develop…
This talk is devoted to review the field of strangeness production in (ultra-)relativistic heavy ion collisions within our present theoretical understanding. Historically there have been (at least) three major ideas for the interest in the…
We propose a mechanism which naturally contains the relation $\mu_{B} = 3\mu_{S}$ of the hadronic gas produced in heavy-ion collisions at CERN. Our starting assumption is the existence of a sharp front separating the quark-gluon plasma…
Using the most advanced model of the hadron resonance gas we reveal, at chemical freeze-out, remarkable irregularities such as an abrupt change of the effective number of degrees of freedom and plateaus in the collision-energy dependence of…
In nuclear collisions at relativistic energies, matter is created which resembles closely the matter that filled all space until about 15 microseconds after the big bang. Here we summarize selected aspects of the research that led to the…