HEAVY ION COLLISIONS: THE QUEST FOR THE QUARK GLUON PLASMA

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A lot of attention has been paid in the last years to high-energy heavy-nuclei collisions. The main goal of these experiments is the characterization of a new form of nuclear matter at extremely high density and temperature, the so called quark gluon plasma (QGP), i.e.  a medium in which new phenomena can be explored, under conditions where the relevant degrees of freedom, over nuclear volumes, are expected to be those of quarks and gluons, rather than of hadrons.

I'll discuss the recent advances in the search for the QGP and its signatures in an extended way: stopping and jet quenching as a signature of creation of dense nuclear matter, collective flow as a tool of compression of nuclear matter and charmonium J/psi suppression as a signature of color screening in a dense QGP, from the SPS energies of 20 GeV, RHIC energies of 200 GeV up to the most recent LHC ones of the order of some TeVs.

Organizer: Professor Lech Szymanowski