Related papers: critRHIC: The RHIC Low Energy Program
The LHC brings nuclear collisions to the TeV scale for the first time and the first data show the qualitative differences of this new regime. The corresponding phase-space available encompasses completely uncharted regions of QCD in which…
We present a comprehensive study of event-by-event multiplicity fluctuations in nucleon-nucleon and nucleus-nucleus interactions from AGS/FAIR to RHIC energies within the UrQMD transport approach. The scaled variances of negative, positive,…
The net-baryon density at midrapidity is proposed as an order parameter in the search for the QCD critical point in heavy ion collisions. As a function of the initial energy and the total number of participants, this quantity obeys a…
A critical examination of RHIC paradigms is presented. Topics include: search for a critical point with a low energy scan; the lack of understanding of radiative processes in a medium in QCD compared in detail to examples from QED; the…
The nuclear symmetry energy at densities above saturation density ($\rho_0\sim 0.16 fm^{-3}$) is poorly constrained theoretically and very few relevant experimental data exist. Its study is possible through Heavy Ion Collisions (HIC) at…
In heavy ion collision experiments as well as in neutron stars, both baryon and isospin chemical potentials are different from zero. In particular, the regime of small isospin chemical potential is phenomenologically important. Using a…
Heavy ion collisions in the low energy run at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Germany are expected to produce a quark-gluon plasma that has a finite baryon chemical…
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…
Recent highlights from Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are reviewed and discussed. Topics include: Discovery of the strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma (sQGP) in 2005; RHIC machine operation…
Heavy ion cross sections totaling several hundred barns have been calculated previously for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These total cross sections are more than an order of magnitude…
The first phase of Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) was started in the year 2010 with the aim to study the several aspects of the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram. The Solenoidal Tracker…
A steep maximum occurs in the Wroblewski ratio between strange and non-strange quarks created in central nucleus-nucleus collisions, of about A=200, at the lower SPS energy $\sqrt{s} \approx$ 7 GeV. By analyzing hadronic multiplicities…
I review some important results from RHIC experiments. They were obtained in a unique environment for studying QCD bulk matter at temperatures and densities that surpass the limits where hadrons can exist as individual entities, raising the…
An analysis of hadron abundances in heavy ion collisions from SPS to RHIC energy within the statistical-thermal model is presented. Pb--Pb collisions at 40 A GeV are analysed for the first time here. Unlike stated in similar recent studies,…
Despite a wealth of experimental data for high p_T processes in heavy-ion collisions, discriminating between different models of hard parton-medium interactions has been difficult. One important reason is that the pQCD parton spectrum at…
The exploration of the QCD phase diagram is the most important task of present heavy ion experiments. In particular, we want to study the phase transition from hadronic to partonic matter and look for the critical point (CP) of strongly…
QCD critical point is a landmark region in the QCD phase diagram outlined by temperature as a function of baryon chemical potential. To the right of this second-order phase transition point, one expects first order quark-hadron phase…
This is an overview of the results from the first 3 years of RHIC experiments. RHIC is a collider built to accelerate nuclei to center of mass energies of 200 GeV per nucleon for the study of QCD in bulk systems. The most important result…
The freeze-out curve, which describes a vast amount of precise experimental data in heavy ion collisions, provides a relation between the colliding energy and the thermodynamical parameters of the fireball. The variance, skew and kurtosis…
Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at RHIC is important to search for the existence of the critical point in the QCD phase diagram. Lattice QCD have shown that the predictions of the susceptibility of the medium formed in heavy-ion collisions…