Universe Colloquium: Soft and Hard Physics with Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

by Alexander Schmah (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Wednesday 3 Feb 2016, 16:30 → 17:30 Europe/Berlin

seminar room (Excellence Cluster Universe, Boltzmannstrasse 2, Garching)

Studying the emergent properties of hot and dense nuclear matter is one of the main goals of relativistic heavy-ion collision experiments. At the highest energies a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) phase arises with partonic degrees of freedom. Due to the extremely short life time of the QGP, only probes which are created during the collision can be used to study its properties. Alexander will discuss recent developments at STAR for two of the most important probes from soft and hard physics, namely elliptic flow and jets. He will furthermore give an overview of the Beam Energy Scan program (BES) at RHIC, which was carried out to find signatures of a QCD critical point and a first order phase transition. At the end he will give an outlook of BES phase II, which is anticipated for the years 2018-2019. The Universe Colloquium is followed by a social gathering with wine and cheese.