Related papers: Will relativistic heavy-ion colliders destroy our …
Recent papers by Busza et al. and Dar et al. have considered empirical bounds on the risk of producing a hypothetical stable negatively charged strangelet at the Brookhaven relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) experiments, and thereby…
The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century. One consequence of the earliest of these…
Collisions of heavy ions (nuclei) at ultra-relativistic energies (sqrt(s_NN) >> 10 GeV per nucleon-nucleon collision in the centre of mass system) are regarded as a unique tool to produce in the laboratory a high energy density and high…
This is a review of the physics prospects for relativistic heavy ion collisions in the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The motivation for the study of superdense matter created in relativistic heavy ion collision is the prospect of observing a…
The safety of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was studied in 2003 by the LHC Safety Study Group, who concluded that they presented no danger. Here we review their 2003 analysis in light of additional experimental results and…
Five years have passed since the first collisions of Au nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island. With nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energies of up to sqrt(s_NN)=200GeV…
We discuss speculative disaster scenarios inspired by hypothetical new fundamental processes that might occur in high energy relativistic heavy ion collisions. We estimate the parameters relevant to black hole production; we find that they…
In heavy-ion collisions at relativistic energies, the incident nuclei travel at nearly the speed of light. These collisions deposit kinetic energy into the overlap region and create a high-temperature environment where hadrons ``melt'' into…
In very high energy collisions nuclei are practically transparent to each other but produce very hot, nearly baryon-free, matter in the so-called central rapidity region. The energy in the central rapidity region comes from the kinetic…
The main goals of relativistic heavy-ion experiments is to study the properties of QCD matter under extreme temperatures and densities. The focus of this talk is the studies that are underway at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC),…
The stopping behaviour of baryons in massive heavy ion collisions (at SPS, RHIC and LHC) is investigated within different microscopic models. At SPS-energies the predictions range from full stopping to virtually total transparency.…
In this paper I highlight a few selected topics on strange particle production in heavy-ion collisions. By studying the yield and spectra of strange particles we hope to gain understanding of the conditions reached in, and the ensuing…
The properties of finite lumps of strange quark matter (strangelets) with emphasis on the two scenarios of producing strange matter in relativistic heavy ion collisions are summarized. As an outlook, the possibility of short-lived strange…
Nuclei are nearly transparent to each other when they collide at high energy, but the collisions do produce high energy density matter in the central rapidity region where most experimental measurements are made. What happens to the…
I review experimental results from ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. Signals of new physics and observables reflecting the underlying collision dynamics are presented, and the evidence for new physics discussed. Measurements of higher…
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…
This talk gives a theoretical perspective of the physics issues awaiting us when heavy ions will collide in the LHC.
There are currently several proposals to build a high-luminosity electron-ion collider, to study the spin structure of matter and measure parton densities in heavy nuclei, and to search for gluon saturation and new phenomena like the…
The first collisions of lead nuclei, delivered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the end of 2010, at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV, marked the beginning of a new era in ultra-relativistic…
Hard processes in nucleus-nucleus interactions at relativistic energies are reviewed with emphasis on recent PHENIX results from the first run of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at BNL. The observed suppression of moderately high $p_T$…