Heavy-ion Reactions at the Energy and Isospin Frontiers

0070818普拉特两个重要的核物理实验设施将在未来两年内投入使用。布鲁克海文国家实验室的相对论重离子对撞机（RHIC）将以极高的能量碰撞重原子核。在反应体积内，应该存在暂时改变物质结构的条件，将夸克从强子中释放出来，熔化QCD真空的非微扰结构。第二个设施是国家超导回旋加速器实验室的耦合回旋加速器项目（CCP）。CCP升级将提供具有极高中子质子比的核束，可用于在核经历β衰变为通常的同位素之前进行实验。通过对这些核的碰撞和对核碎片的观测，我们希望能推断出有关丰中子物质状态方程的信息，从而更好地理解核碎裂的过程。我们工作的主要目的是提供理论解释的测量在这些设施。由于关于大体积物质性质的问题只能通过对这些实验的详细分析来间接解决，因此理论在分析这些实验结果中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.