Related papers: Possible Striking Signals for a Quark-Gluon Plasma…
Since the early eighties, we have shared with Leon Van Hove the following view. That if a QGP were produced in high energy heavy ion colliders, that its hadronization products would likely come from small localized in phase space bubbles of…
We review the most important experimental results from the first three years of nucleus-nucleus collision studies at RHIC, with emphasis on results from the STAR experiment, and we assess their interpretation and comparison to theory. The…
We study the nucleation of a quark gluon plasma (QGP) phase in a hadron gas at low temperatures and high baryon densities. This kind of process will presumably happen very often in nuclear collisions at FAIR and NICA. When the appropriate…
This article reviews several important results from RHIC experiments and discusses their implications. They were obtained in a unique environment for studying QCD matter at temperatures and densities that exceed the limits wherein hadrons…
This brief review summarizes the main experimental discoveries made at RHIC and then discusses their implications. The robust collective flow phenomena are well described by ideal hydrodynamics, with the Equation of State (EoS) predicted by…
While heavy ion collisions at the SPS have produced excited strongly interacting matter near the conditions for quark deconfinement, the RHIC may be the first machine capable of creating quark-antiquark plasmas sufficiently long-lived to…
Hydrodynamical modeling of heavy ion collisions at RHIC suggests that the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) "thermalizes" in a remarkably short time scale, about 0.6 fm/c. We argue that this should be viewed as indicating fast isotropization, but…
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…
We review the physics of nuclear matter at high energy density and the experimental search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The data obtained in the first three years of the RHIC physics program…
An abundance of the strangeness that can be induced in a thermalized quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is considered as a signal of the QGP phase appearing in the intermediate state of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. As a quantitative…
The status of the physics of heavy ion collisions is reviewed based on measurements over the past 6 years from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The dense nuclear matter produced in Au+Au…
Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), defined on a discrete space time lattice, leads to a spectacular non-perturbative prediction of a new state of matter, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP), at sufficiently high temperatures or equivalently…
Ideal hydroynamics provides an excellent description of all aspects of the single-particle spectra of all hadrons with transverse momenta below about 1.5-2 GeV/c at RHIC. This is shown to require rapid local thermalization at a time scale…
Over the last decade it has been established that a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is formed in ultrarelativistic A+A collisions at RHIC energies. In recent years, detector upgrades have enabled the detailed study of this hot and dense matter.…
We consider time-scales of first-order deconfinement or chiral-symmetry restoring phase transition in high energy heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. Recently it was shown that the system must supercool below $T_c$ before the…
We investigate the onset of wave-breaking in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) formed in heavy-ion collisions at both RHIC and the LHC. A nonlinear longitudinal color field is coupled to a three-dimensional viscous hydrodynamic background…
Heavy ion collisions at the LHC facility generate a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) which, for central collisions, has a higher energy density and temperature than the plasma generated in central collisions at the RHIC. But sufficiently peripheral…
In gold-gold collisions of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) a perfect fluid of quarks, sometimes called the strongly interacting quark gluon plasma (sQGP) is created for an extremely short time. The time evolution of this fluid…
The possibility of unified description of hadron multiple production in heavy ion collisions over the wide energy interval, from few hundreds MeV/n at GSI/SIS through 11 GeV/n at BNL/AGS up to 160 GeV/n at CERN/SPS, has been emphasized…
Three empirical lines of evidence from RHIC have converged and point to the discovery of a strongly coupled Quark Gluon Plasma. The evidence includes (1) bulk collective elliptic flow and (2) jet quenching and mono-jet production, observed…