Related papers: Can supercooling explain the HBT puzzle?
Two particle correlation data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have provided detailed femtoscopic information describing the space-time structure of the emission of pions. This data had avoided description with hydrodynamic-based…
The problem of early thermalization of matter produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC is discussed in the framework of a hybrid model that consists of the transverse-hydrodynamics stage followed by the standard perfect-fluid…
We introduce a new scenario for heavy ion collisions that could solve the lingering problems associated with the so-called HBT puzzle. We postulate that the system starts expansion as the perfect quark-gluon fluid but close to freeze-out it…
The general formalism of homogeneous nucleation theory is applied to study the hadronization pattern of the ultra-relativistic quark-gluon plasma (QGP) undergoing a first order phase transition. A coalescence model is proposed to describe…
It is shown that recent RHIC data on hadron spectra and elliptic flow can be excellently reproduced within a hydrodynamic description of the collision dynamics, and that this provides strong evidence for rapid thermalization while the…
I present a theory-guided review of RHIC data, arguing that they provide strong evidence for formation of a thermalized quark-gluon plasma at RHIC. Strong radial flow reflects high thermal pressure in the reaction zone. Large elliptic flow…
In high-energy heavy-ion collisions, a nearly perfect fluid is formed, known as the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP). After a short thermalization period, the evolution of this medium can be described by the equations of…
The strongly interacting Quark-Gluon-Plasma (sQGP) created in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions, can be described by hydrodynamic models. Low energy hadrons are created after the so called freeze-out of this medium, thus their…
This dissertation examines the phenomenology of statistical hadronization at ultrarelativistic energies. We start with an overview of current experimental and theoretical issues in Relativistic heavy ion physics. We then introduce…
In ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions heavy quarks are produced out of thermal equilibrium in the very early stage of the reaction and their thermalization time was expected to be considerably larger than that of light quarks. On the…
The recent status of hard thermal photon production in relativistic heavy ion collisions is reviewed and the current rates are presented with emphasis on corrected bremsstrahlung processes in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and quark-hadron…
We describe a new scenario (first introduced in [G. Torrieri, B. Tom\'a\v{s}ik and I. Mishustin, Phys. Rev. C \textbf{77}, 034903 (2008)]) for freezeout in heavy ion collisions that could solve the lingering problems associated with the…
After some historic remarks and a brief summary of recent theoretical news about the QCD phases, we turn to the issue of $freeze-out$ in heavy ion collisions. We argue that the chemical freeze-out line should actually consists of two…
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…
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…
Our recently developed 2+1 (boost-invariant) hydrodynamic model has been presented and used to i) describe the soft hadronic data collected in the central region of the relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and ii) to make predictions…
Abundances and $m_\bot$-spectra of strange and other hadronic particles emanating from central 158-200 A GeV reactions between nuclei are found to originate from a thermally equilibrated, deconfined source in chemical non-equilibrium.…
Hydrodynamics merged with single-freeze-out statistical hadronization is used to describe the midrapidity hadron production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the highest RHIC energies and to make predictions for the LHC. Thermodynamic…
The expansion of the strongly interacting quark gluon plasma (sQGP) created in Au+Au collisions at RHIC can be described by hydrodynamical models. Hadrons are created after a freeze-out, thus their distribution describes the final state of…
We analyze hadrochemical freeze-out in central Pb+Pb collisions at CERN SPS energies, employing the hybrid version of the Ultrarelativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics model, which describes the transition from a hydrodynamic stage to…