What RHIC experiments and theory tell us about properties of quark–gluon plasma?

By E. Shuryak. 2004

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract 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 lattice simulations. However the transport properties turned out to be unexpected, with rescattering cross section one-to-two orders of magnitude larger than expected from perturbative QCD. These and other theoretical developments indicate that quark–gluon plasma (QGP) produced at RHIC, and probably in a wider temperature region T c T 4 T c , is not at all a weakly coupled quasiparticle gas, but is rather in a strongly coupled regime, sQGP for short. After reviewing two other “strongly coupled systems”, (i) the strongly coupled supersymmetric theories studied via Maldacena duality; (ii) trapped ultra-cold atoms with very large scattering length, we return to sQGP and show that there should exist literally hundreds of bound states in it in the RHIC domain, most them colored. We then discuss recent ideas of their effect on the EoS, viscosity and jet quenching.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31aa5e3be6b5de4edc1a7754f05f9381f43d8a22

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Energy loss of a heavy quark from asymptotically AdS geometries (2006, neutral): “ the strong ’t Hooft coupling limit. And this value, which is lower than any weakly coupled theory or known material substance [23], is in good agreement with hydrodynamic modeling of RHIC collisions [24,25]. Although one could introduce a chemical potential for heavy quarks, a U(1)R potential is a ”
Strongly correlated quantum fluids: ultracold quantum gases, quantum chromodynamic plasmas and holographic duality (2012, background): “of free quarks and gluons [10, 11].”
Drag force in AdS/CFT (2006, background): “Indeed, a significant literature has emerged on this topic, with which my familiarity is regrettably slight: see for example [7, 8, 9, 10] and references therein.”
Energy loss of a heavy quark moving through Script N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma (2006, background): “At RHIC, collisions of gold nuclei at 200 GeV per nucleon are believed to produce a quark-gluon plasma which, throughout most of the collision, should be viewed as strongly coupled [17, 18].”
Boost invariant flow, black hole formation, and far-from-equilibrium dynamics in N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory (2009, background): “Nevertheless, aspects of this process involving strongly coupled dynamics can be studied in a controlled setting in a class of theories which describe non-Abelian plasmas similar to the QGP, and which possess dual gravitational descriptions.”
Effect of curvature squared corrections in AdS on the viscosity of the dual gauge theory (2007, background): “In addition to these fundamental questions, the results may turn relevant to the quark-gluon plasma, whose viscosity is measured to be close to the bound [17] (and possibly violates the bound [18, 19]).”
Gauge-gravity duality and thermalization of a boost-invariant perfect fluid (2006, methodology): “ our calculation in the framework of the N = 4 SUSY Yang-Mills ﬂuid, and the problems discussed about the thermalization proper-time of a QCD plasma formed in a heavy-ion reaction at high energy (see [12] and references therein). Indeed, there are some indication that this typical proper-time is 8 r”