Related papers: The quark-gluon plasma at RHIC
The large elliptic flow observed in Au-Au collisions at RHIC is often put forward as a compelling evidence for the formation of a strongly-interacting quark-gluon plasma. The main argument is that the measured elliptic flow is as large as…
After 15 years of heavy-ion collision experiments at the AGS and SPS, the recent turn-on of RHIC has initiated a new stage of quark-gluon plasma studies. I review the evidence for deconfined quark-gluon matter at SPS energies and the recent…
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was built to re-create and study in the laboratory the extremely hot and dense matter that filled our entire universe during its first few microseconds. Its operation since June 2000 has been…
Ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are thought to have produced a state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma, characterized by a very small shear-viscosity to entropy-density ratio…
The lecture is a brief review of the following topics: (i) collective flow phenomena in heavy ion collisions. The data from RHIC indicate robust collective flows, well described by hydrodynamics with expected Equation of State. The…
It is shown that due to contribution of the hadrons, emitted directly from the inner hot region of central heavy ion collision, radial flow of the final state hadrons is rather sensitive to the creation of quark-gluon plasma with mixed…
We present calculations of two-pion and two-kaon correlation functions in relativistic heavy ion collisions from a relativistic transport model that includes explicitly a first-order phase transition from a thermalized quark-gluon plasma to…
Data from the first three years of running at RHIC are reviewed and put into context with data obtained previously at the AGS and SPS and with the physics question of creation of a quark-gluon plasma in high energy heavy ion collisions.…
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…
We present a novel multimessenger approach to extract the effective radial flow of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) by jointly analyzing thermal photon and dilepton spectra in heavy-ion collisions. A key feature of this method is that it…
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…
Anisotropic flow is recognized as one of the main observables providing information on the early stage of a heavy-ion collision. At RHIC the observed strong collective flow of the bulk matter is considered evidence for an early onset of…
We discuss recent developments in assessing heavy-quark interaction in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). While induced gluon radiation is expected to be the main energy-loss mechanism for fast-moving quarks, we focus on elastic scattering which…
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…
We calculate the elliptic flow of thermal photons from Au+Au collisions at RHIC energies for a range of values for the formation time $\tau_0$ but fixed entropy (or particle rapidity density). The results are found to be quite sensitive to…
For central heavy ion collisions at the RHIC energy, the entropy per unit rapidity dS/dy at freeze-out is extracted with minimal model dependence from available experimental measurements of particle yields, spectra, and source sizes…
Results from the data obtained in the first physics run of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have shown suprisingly large elliptic flow and suprisingly small HBT radii. Attempts to explain both results in a consistant picture have…
We study the evolution of the quark-gluon composition of the plasma created in ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions (uRHIC's) employing a partonic transport theory that includes both elastic and inelastic collisions plus a mean fields…
Initial conditions for quark-gluon plasma formation at $\tau=0.1\fm$ are considered in lowest order perturbative QCD. Chemical composition, thermalization of the formed semihard quark-gluon system and especially implications of the new HERA…
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…