Comprehensive Investigation of Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions at RHIC and the LHC

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In normal nuclear matter, quarks and gluons which constitute protons and neutrons, are permanently confined inside the hadrons. When temperature reaches trillions of kelvin, this is no longer true. At these extremely high temperatures, space is so packed with thermally produced hadrons that an individual hadron can no longer maintain the integrity of its confinement. In effect, ordinary nuclear matter "melts'' and releases the quarks and gluons. The liberated quarks and gluons then form a new state of matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). This extreme state of matter existed in nature only about a microsecond after the Big-Bang.For the past 2 decades, relativistic heavy ion colliders at CERN in Europe and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US have been colliding heavy nuclei to create and characterize QGP. By now, the experiments have accumulated an ample amount of evidence that the sought-after QGP is indeed being created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. Many of the properties found in the experimental evidence were, however, highly surprising. For example, this hottest and densest matter ever created may also be one of the most strongly interacting systems ever observed, flowing more ideally than the superfluid Helium! There have been intense theoretical investigations on these properties by many groups in the world. However, there are still many important puzzles that await theoretical resolution even as the LHC at CERN is beginning to accumulate a tremendous amount of new data at an unprecedentedly high colliding energy.A comprehensive understanding of QGP in heavy ion collisions calls for a remarkable range of theoretical arsenals. This includes classical Yang-Mills theory, relativistic viscous hydrodynamics in 3+1D and a hadronic molecular dynamics simulations. This is an ambitious goal, but at this point, I am one of the very few in the world who is capable of marshaling all the necessary tools. In this proposal, I propose to carry out comprehensive characterization of QGP in heavy ion collisions with all the theoretical tools I and my students can employ.