Related papers: Sudden Hadronization in Relativistic Nuclear Colli…
We argue that features of hadron production in relativistic nuclear collisions, mainly at CERN-SPS energies, may be explained by the existence of three forms of matter: Hadronic Matter, Quarkyonic Matter, and a Quark-Gluon Plasma. We…
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…
In ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons is formed within $1$ fm/c of the nuclei's impact. The complex dynamics of the collision before $\approx 1$ fm/c is often described with parametric models,…
Many probes are proposed to determine the quark-gluon plasma and explore its properties in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Some of them are related to initial states of the collisions, such as collective flow, Hanbury-Brown-Twiss…
We examine the effects of color screening on the transition of a parton plasma into a hadron gas at RHIC energies. It is found that as expected, color screening posed itself as a significant barrier for hadronization. Parton-hadron…
Recent studies based on non-perturbative lattice Monte-Carlo solutions of Quantum Chromodynamics, the theory of strong interactions, demonstrated that at high temperature there is a phase change from confined hadronic matter to a deconfined…
The fireball created in an ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision is the environment in which all processes providing clues about the possible formation of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) happen. It is therefore crucial to understand the…
High-energy nuclear collisions produce quark-gluon plasmas that expand and hadronize. If the associated phase transition is of first order then the hadronization should proceed through a spinodal phase separation. We explore here the…
It is suggested that the hadronization of the quark-gluon plasma is a first-order phase transition described by a critical curve in the temperature-(quark) density plane which terminates in a critical point. Such a critical curve is derived…
Major aspects of the subhadronic state of nuclear matter populated with deconfined color particles are reviewed. At high and even at rather low nuclear collision energies, this is expected to be a short-term quark-gluon plasma (QGP), but,…
I review the status of the search for quark-gluon plasma in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The available data provide strong evidence for the "three pillars of the Little Bang model": strong radial expansion of the collision fireball…
We discuss recent experimental results in the field of ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions. The emerging ``picture'' is a collectively expanding, initially hot and dense fireball in which strangeness- and low-mass di-lepton pair…
The experimental results on the pion, strangeness and J/psi production in high energy nuclear collisions are discussed. The anomalous energy dependence of pion and strangeness production is consistent with the hypothesis that a transition…
We investigate the heavy flavor dynamics in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) medium created in p-Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the (3+1)-dimensional viscous hydrodynamics model describing QGP medium, the dynamics of…
The quark-gluon plasma, formed in the first 3 fm/c of the heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC, supercooles due to nucleation and develops soon a negative pressure in the bag model. The negative pressure yields mechanical instability which…
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…
In the context of the `jet quenching' phenomena typically materialization of the jet is assumed to take place in vacuum outside the reaction zone. On the other hand quantum mechanical estimates give a hadronization time on the order of only…
The results of the WA97 collaboration for strange particle production at mid-rapidity in Pb--Pb collisions at 158 GeV A/c at CERN display a strong strangeness enhancement with system size at mid-rapidity which is dependent on the…
At high temperatures, strongly interacting matter becomes a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons. In statistical QCD, deconfinement and the properties of the resulting quark-gluon plasma can be investigated by studying the in-medium…
QCD predicts that strongly interacting matter will undergo a transition from a state of hadronic constituents to a plasma of unbound quarks and gluons. We first survey the conceptual features of this transition and its description in finite…