Heavy-ion Reactions at the Energy and Isospin Frontiers

普拉特两个重要的实验核物理设施将在未来两年投入使用。布鲁克海文国家实验室的相对论重离子对撞机(RHIC)将以极高的能量对撞重核。在反应体积内，应该存在暂时改变物质结构的条件，将夸克从它们通常在强子中的限制中解放出来，并融化QCD真空的非微扰结构。第二个设施是国家超导回旋实验室的耦合回旋加速器项目(CCP)。CCP的升级将为原子核提供极高的中质子比，可用于在原子核经历贝塔衰变到通常的同位素之前进行实验。通过对这些核的碰撞和对出射核碎片的观察，我们希望能推断出富中子物质的状态方程的信息，从而更好地理解核碎裂的过程。我们工作的主要目的是为这些设施中的测量提供理论上的解释。由于有关块状物质性质的问题只是通过对这类实验的详细分析来间接解决的，所以理论在分析这类实验结果时起着特别重要的作用。

0070818Pratt Two important experimental nuclear physics facilities are becoming operational in the next two years. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory will collide heavy nuclei at extremely high energy. Within the reaction volume, conditions should exist to temporarily alter the structure of matter, liberating quarks from their usual confinement within hadrons andmelting the non-perturbative structure of the QCD vacuum. The second facility is the Coupled Cyclotron Project (CCP) at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. The CCP upgrade will provide beams of nuclei with exceptionally high neutron-to-proton ratios, which can be used to perform experiments before the nuclei undergo beta decay to the usual isotopes. By colliding such nuclei and observing the outgoing nuclear fragments, we hope to infer information about the equation of state of neutron-rich matter and tobetter understand the process of nuclear fragmentation. The principal aim of our work is to provide theoretical interpretations of the measurements in these facilities. Since the questions regarding bulk-matter properties are addressed only indirectly through detailed analyses of such experiments, theory plays an especially integral role in the analyses of such experimental results.