Related papers: Explosive Collisions at RHIC?
In nucleus-nucleus collisions at ultra-relativistic energies matter is formed with initial energy density significantly exceeding the critical energy density for the transition from hadronic to partonic matter. We will review the…
I sketch how long wavelength modes of the pion field can be amplified during the QCD phase transition. If nature had been kinder, and had made the pion mass significantly less than the critical temperature for the transition, then this…
We consider the (3+1) dimensional expansion and cooling of the chirally-restored and deconfined matter at finite net-baryon densities as expected in heavy-ion collisions at moderate energies. In our approach, we consider chiral fields and…
Heavy-ion collisions at relativistic energies probe matter at extreme conditions of temperatures and energy densities. The study of event-by-event fluctuations of experimental observables is crucial to probe the QCD phase transition, locate…
Phase transitions associated with nearly conformal dynamics are known to lead to significant supercooling. A notorious example is the phase transition in Randall-Sundrum models or their CFT duals. In fact, it was found that the phase…
I give a brief overview of our present understanding of the high temperature phase of QCD, trying to clarify some of the theoretical issues involved in the current discussions that emphasize the strongly coupled character of the quark-gluon…
I present the motivation for studying nuclear collisions at ultrarelativistic energies which is to map the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter under very extreme conditions. The relevant experimental efforts are overviewed and…
Recent experimental results obtained at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) will be discussed. Investigations of different nucleus-nucleus collisions in recent years focus on two main tasks, namely, the detailed study of sQGP…
We investigate correlation functions of the Polyakov loop and static meson/diquark systems with the chiral condensate and the quark number density at finite temperature. In particular the latter observable can give insight in the mechanism…
I discuss how the initial conditions for QGP-production in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at the LHC and RHIC can be computed from perturbative QCD.
We perform a field-theoretical computation of hadron production in large systems at the QCD confinement phase transition associated with restoration of the Z(3) global symmetry. This occurs from the decay of a condensate for the Polyakov…
We discuss an effective Polyakov loop model for QCD thermodynamics with a chemical potential. Using high temperature expansion techniques the partition sum is mapped exactly onto the partition sum of a flux model. In the flux representation…
Strong magnetic fields are commonly generated in off-central relativistic heavy-ion collisions in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab and in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and have been used to probe the…
A model for the production of quarkonium states in the midrapidity region at RHIC and LHC energy range is presented which explores well understood properties of QCD only. An increase of the quarkonium hadronisation time with the initial…
For a complete understanding of the QCD phase diagram it is important to connect first-principle thermodynamic calculations to experimental data from the RHIC Beam Energy Scan and the future experimental facilities FAIR, GSI, and NICA,…
The status of RHIC theory and phenomenology is reviewed with an emphasis on the indications for the creation of a new deconfined state of matter. The critical role of high energy nuclear physics in the development of theoretical tools that…
We model the initial confinement-deconfinement transition in relativistic heavy-ion collisions as a rapid quench in view of expected rapid thermalization to a QGP state. The transition is studied using the Polyakov loop model, with the…
Enhanced fluctuations and correlations have been observed in the phase transitions of many systems. Their appearance at the predicted QCD phase transition (especially near the expected critical point) may provide insight into the nature of…
To obtain deeper understanding of QCD properties at finite temperature, we consider the Fourier decomposition of the grand-canonical partition function based on the canonical ensemble method via the imaginary chemical potential. Expectation…
We compute the collisional energy loss for a heavy quark above the critical temperature in Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD). We work in the semi Quark-Gluon Plasma, which assumes that this region is dominated by the non-trivial holonomy of the…