Related papers: Matter & More in Nuclear Collisions
Despite numerous achievements and recent progress, nuclear physics is often (wrongly) considered an old field of research nowadays. However, developments in theoretical frameworks and reliable experimental techniques have made the field…
One of the main activities in high-energy and nuclear physics is the search for the so-called quark-gluon plasma, a new state of matter which should have existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang. A quark-gluon plasma consists of free…
Electromagnetic probes are not affected by hadronization and provide direct information about the space-time evolution of high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. In particular, the measurement of thermal radiation from the quark-gluon…
A fundamental question of physics is what ultimately happens to matter as it is heated or compressed. In the realm of very high temperature and density the fundamental degrees of freedom of the strong interaction, quarks and gluons, come…
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…
Relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions create a "fireball" of strongly interacting matter at high energy density. At very high energy this is suggested to be partonic matter, but at lower energy it should consist of yet unknown hadronic,…
In ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions the produced high temperature, high energy density state will cross different phases of the strongly interacting matter. The original idea of quark-gluon plasma formation has been evolved and the…
This work establishes a deep connection between two seemingly distant branches of nuclear physics: nuclear structure and relativistic heavy-ion collisions. At the heart of this connection is the recent discovery made at particle colliders…
An outlook on physics at the high energy frontier of nucleus-nucleus collisions is presented, on the basis of the new results presented at Quark Matter 2011 by the LHC and RHIC experiments.
With high energy heavy ion collisions one tries to create a new forms of matter that is similar to the one present at the birth of our Universe. Recent development on flow pattern, initial energy-density and freeze-out temperature shows…
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,…
A light front field theory for finite temperature and density is currently being developed. It will be used here to describe the transition region from quark matter to nuclear matter relevant in heavy ion collisions and in the early…
Highly excited nuclear matter created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions possibly reaches the phase of quark deconfinement. It quickly cools down and hadronises. We explain that the process of hadronisation may likely be connected…
Ultraperipheral collisions at collider energies are a useful tool to study photon-hadron (proton/nucleus) and photon-photon interactions in a hitherto unexplored energy regime. Theoretical tools to study these processes are briefly…
An elementary introduction to the physics of quark-gluon plasma is given. We start with a sketchy presentation of the Quantum Chromodynamics which is the fundamental theory of strong interactions. The structure of hadrons built up of quarks…
We analyze the possibilities for studying properties of dense QCD-matter, created in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions, by hard QCD-production processes, so-called "hard" probes -- heavy quarkonia, hard jets, high mass dimuons. Special…
Laboratory experiments with high-energetic heavy-ion collisions offer the opportunity to explore fundamental properties of nuclear matter, such as the high-density equation-of-state, which governs the structure and dynamics of cosmic…
The formation of hadrons is a fundamental process in nature that can be investigated at particle colliders. As several recent findings demonstrate, with $\mathrm{e^+e^-}$ collisions as a "vacuum-like" reference at one extreme, and central…
Present status and future prospect of the quest for the quark-gluon plasma with untrarelativistic nuclear collisions are discussed.
Highly effective conversion of kinetic energy into abundant particle multiplicity is the remarkable feature discovered in high energy heavy ion collisions. This short and pedagogic review addresses topical issues related to the…