Dynamics of ultradense matter produced in relativistic nuclear collisions

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0140046ZhangDuring the initial stage of relativistic nuclear collisions, enormous amountof energy is deposited in the collision region and the temperature anddensity can be high enough that individual hadrons lose their identities.Instead of being confined in hadrons, quarks and gluons can now move"freely" in this collision region. The matter thus produced is called theQuark-Gluon Plasma. The transition between hadronic matter and theQuark-Gluon Plasma gives us insight into the interactions between quarks andgluons under extreme conditions. It is also useful for the understanding ofprocesses going on in other high temperature and/or high density regions,for example, in the early Universe and in the cores of neutron stars. Toextract information about the Quark-Gluon Plasma from the experimentalobservables, to bridge the initial quark and gluon distributions and thefinal hadron distributions, the PI will investigate the effects of thespace-time evolution of the strongly interacting matter produced inrelativistic collisions. In particular, a transport model approach will befurther developed and used as the major theoretical tool for a detailedstudy of the transient formation and evolution of the finite size,ultradense system produced in relativistic nuclear collisions withnonequilibrium, viscous effects automatically taken into account. Theresearch will advance the understanding of strong interaction physics thatis the focus of current experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliderat Brookhaven National Laboratory and the nuclear physics program at thefuture Large Hadron Collider at CERN.