Related papers: Explosive Collisions at RHIC?
Recent experimental and theoretical developments have motivated interest in a more detailed exploration of heavy ion collisions in the range sqrt(sNN)=5-15 GeV. In contrast to interactions at the full RHIC energy of sqrt(sNN)=200 GeV, such…
This talk will discuss how to compute initial quantites in heavy ion collisions at RHIC (200 AGeV) and at LHC (5500 AGeV) using perturbative QCD (pQCD) by including the next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections and a dynamical determination…
We study genuine finite density effects in QCD-like theories with three-dimensional Polyakov-loop effective theories for heavy quarks. These are derived from the full QCD-like theories by combined strong-coupling and hopping expansions. In…
With combined hopping parameter and strong coupling expansions, we calculate a dimensionally reduced Polyakov-loop effective theory valid for heavy quarks at nonzero temperature and arbitrary chemical potential. We numerically compute the…
We review the basic concepts of perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and relativistic hydrodynamics, and their applications to hadron production in high energy nuclear collisions. We discuss results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion…
QCD predicts a phase transition between hadronic matter and a Quark Gluon Plasma at high energy density. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory is a new facility dedicated to the experimental study of…
The Polyakov loop potential serves to distinguish between the confined hadronic and the deconfined quark-gluon plasma phases of QCD. For Nf=2+1 quark flavors with physical masses we determine the Polyakov loop potential at finite…
I review arguments for the existence of a critical point in the QCD phase diagram as a function of temperature and baryon chemical potential. I describe how heavy ion collision experiments at the SPS and RHIC can discover the tell-tale…
For the $Z_{3}$-symmetric lattice QCD-like theory ($Z_3$-QCD), in which $SU(3)$ gauge theory is coupled with three fundamental Wilson quarks with flavor-dependent twisted boundary conditions, we calculate the expectation values of Polyakov…
We present a review of the studies related to establishing the QCD phase diagram through high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. We particularly focus on the experimental results related to the formation of a quark-gluon phase, crossover…
We discuss medium effects on light cluster production in the QCD phase diagram by relating Mott transition lines to those for chemical freeze-out. In heavy-ion collisions at highest energies provided by the LHC, light cluster abundances…
The deconfinement phase transition in large-$N_c$ QCD is studied within the framework of an effective Polyakov-loop model, where the potential has a U(1) symmetry originating in the large-$N_c$ limit of a Z$_{N_c}$-symmetric model. At the…
Fast thermalization and a strong buildup of elliptic flow of QCD matter as found at RHIC are understood as the consequence of perturbative QCD (pQCD) interactions within the 3+1 dimensional parton cascade BAMPS. The main contributions stem…
On the basis of the NJL model as an effective theory of QCD and analogies with condensed matter physics, we extract simple physical pictures of the chiral phase transition at finite temperature $T$ and/or chemical potential $\mu$ and…
We make up-to-date QCD predictions for open charm and bottom production at RHIC in nucleon-nucleon collisions at \sqrt{S} = 200 GeV. We also calculate the electron spectrum resulting from heavy flavor decays to allow direct comparison to…
We show the existence of strong (anti)correlations between the topological hot spots and the local values of the trace of the Polyakov loop in $2+1$ flavor QCD with physical quark mass, in the vicinity of the crossover transition…
In these lectures I discuss cosmological phase transitions with the goal of establishing the possibility of observational consequences. I argue that the {\em only} phase transition amenable of experimental study within the foreseeable…
In this article, for the first time, we explore the scenario that the dark-QCD sector has a large chemical potential $\mu$ (on the order of magnitude of temperature) of dark quarks. It leads to a complex-valued Polyakov loop and tilts the…
The relevance of higher order cumulants of conserved charges for the analysis of freeze-out and critical conditions in heavy ion collisions at LHC and RHIC is discussed. Using properties of $O(4)$ scaling functions, the generic structure of…
The variational Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge is reviewed and the essential results obtained in recent years are summarized. First the results for the vacuum sector are discussed, with a special emphasis on the mechansim of…