Related papers: Bubble dynamics and the quark-hadron phase transit…
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 $T_c$,…
There are strong indications that ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, produced in accelarators, lead to the formation of a new state of matter: the quark gluon plasma (QGP). This deconfined QCD matter is expected to exist just for very…
The early stage of high multiplicity nuclear collisions is represented by a nearly quarkless, hot, deconfined pure gluon plasma. This new scenario should be characterized by a suppression of high $p_T$ photons and dileptons as well as by…
Dynamical models based on relativistic fluid dynamics provide a powerful tool to extract the properties of the strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced by ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions. The largest source of uncertainty in…
Heavy quarks are produced at the first instant of a nucleus--nucleus collision and therefore are an important tool to study the subsequent high energy-density medium formed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A series of…
Understanding the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) offers insights into the strong interaction and the conditions of the early universe.Since the QGP cannot be observed directly, its properties must be inferred from the particles…
This article reviews several important results from RHIC experiments and discusses their implications. They were obtained in a unique environment for studying QCD matter at temperatures and densities that exceed the limits wherein hadrons…
The Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is created in high energy heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This medium is transparent to electromagnetic probes but nearly opaque to colored…
I review evidence for the stability of bubbles in the quark-gluon plasma near the confinement phase transition. In analogy with the much-studied oil-water emulsions, this raises the possibility that there are many phases between the pure…
We compare different models for hadronic and quark phases of cold baryon-rich matter in an attempt to find a deconfinement phase transition between them. For the hadronic phase we consider Walecka-type mean-field models which describe well…
The current status of various thermal and statistical descriptions of particle production in the ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions experiments is presented in detail. We discuss the formulation of various types of thermal models of a…
Heavy ion collisions at the LHC facility generate a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) which, for central collisions, has a higher energy density and temperature than the plasma generated in central collisions at the RHIC. But sufficiently peripheral…
This M.Sc. thesis in Engineering Physics is an overview of the present theory of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) as well as an analysis of the stability criterion for possible stable cosmic QGP objects left over from the quark-hadron transition in…
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…
We review the physics of nuclear matter at high energy density and the experimental search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The data obtained in the first three years of the RHIC physics program…
One of the primary aims of the ongoing nuclear collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies is to create a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). The heavy quarks constitutes a unique probe of the QGP…
Lattice QCD results reveal that the critical parameters and the order of the quark-hadron phase transition are quite sensitive to the number of dynamical flavours and their masses included in the theory. Motivated by this result we develop…
Measured hadron yields from relativistic nuclear collisions can be equally well understood in two physically distinct models, namely a static thermal hadronic source vs.~a time-dependent, nonequilibrium hadronization off a quark-gluon…
There seems to be a general consensus now that a first glimpse of a QGP-like effect has become visible in the beautiful NA50 data on J/\psi production and the `anomalous supression' phenomenon. On the other hand, it is still widely believed…
A standard picture in cosmology has been emerging over the past decade in which a phase transition, associated with chiral symmetry breaking after the electroweak transition, has occurred at approximately $10^{-6}$ seconds after the Big…