Related papers: QCD thermalization: Ab initio approaches and inter…
We present an introductory review of the early time dynamics of high-energy heavy-ion collisions and the kinetics of high temperature QCD. The equilibration mechanisms in the quark-gluon plasma uniquely reflect the non-abelian and…
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 $\epsilon \sim 1/\tau$…
Ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at the laboratory provide a unique chance to study quantum chromodynamics (QCD) under extreme temperature (${\approx}150\,\mathrm{MeV}$) and density (${\approx}1\,\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{fm}^3$)…
High energy heavy-ion collisions in laboratory produce a form of matter that can test Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, at high temperatures. One of the exciting possibilities is the existence of…
Strongly interacting matter as described by the thermodynamics of QCD undergoes a phase transition, from a low temperature hadronic medium to a high temperature quark-gluon plasma state. In the early universe this transition occurred during…
Collisions between heavy atomic nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies are carried out at particle colliders to produce the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter where quarks and gluons are not confined into hadrons, and colour degrees of…
The rapid thermalization of quarks and gluons in the initial stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions is treated using analytic solutions of a nonlinear diffusion equation with schematic initial conditions, and for gluons with boundary…
The past decade has seen huge advances in experimental measurements made in heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and more recently at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These new data, in combination with…
I review our current understanding of the processes driving the thermalization and isotropization of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) created in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions (URHICs). I begin by discussing the phenomenological…
At high temperatures or densities matter formed by strongly interacting elementary particles (hadronic matter) is expected to undergo a transition to a new form of matter - the quark gluon plasma - in which elementary particles (quarks and…
We describe some of the recent progress in the calculation of thermodynamic quantities in QCD at high temperatures and densities by weak-coupling techniques and extrapolation to realistic coupling strength. We argue that a (mostly) weakly…
The thermalization of quark gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a crucial theoretical question in understanding the onset of hydrodynamics, and in a broad sense, a key step to the exploration of thermalization in…
Heavy-ion colliders have revealed the process of "fast thermalization". This experimental breakthrough has led to new theoretical tools to study the thermalization process at both weak and strong coupling. We apply this to the reheating…
The transport properties of quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions are quantified by an improved global Bayesian analysis using the CERN Large Hadron Collider Pb--Pb data at $\sqrt{s_{\textbf{NN}}}=2.76\;$ and…
The ultimate aim of high energy heavy ion collisions is to study quark deconfinement and the quark-gluon plasma predicted by quantum chromodynamics. This requires the identification of observables calculable in QCD and measurable in heavy…
This lecture presents an overview of the status of the investigation of the properties of the quark-gluon plasma using relativistic heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It…
We employ a non-equilibrium Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) kinetic description to study the kinetic and chemical equilibration of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) at weak coupling. Based on our numerical framework, which explicitly includes all…
High-energy heavy-ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the properties of the hot and dense strongly-interacting system composed of deconfined quarks and gluons -- the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) -- in laboratory conditions. The…
After decades of painstaking research, the field of heavy ion physics has reached an exciting new era. Evidence is mounting that we can create a high temperature, high density, strongly interacting ``bulk matter'' state in the laboratory --…
Hydrodynamical analysis of experimental data of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions seems to indicate that the hot QCD matter created in the collisions thermalizes very quickly. Theoretically, we have no idea why this should be true. In…