A Short Course on Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

Some ideas/concepts in relativistic heavy ion collisions are discussed. To a large extent, the discussions are non-comprehensive and non-rigorous. It is intended for fresh graduate students of Homi Bhabha National Institute, Kolkata Centre, who are intending to pursue career in theoretical /experimental high energy nuclear physics. Comments and criticisms will be appreciated.

Relativistic Hydrodynamics in Heavy-Ion Collisions: General Aspects and Recent Developments

“…Most of the following discussions can be also found in more details in Ref. [32,[89][90][91][92][93][94].…”

Measurement of electrons from open heavy-flavor hadron decays in pp at s = 13 TeV and electrons from beauty-hadron decays in Pb-Pb at sNN = 5.02 TeV collisions by ALICE at LHC

“…Also differently from QED, the gauge boson in QCD also carries charge: the color of the gluon is a combination of a color charge and an anti-color charge. This results in eight linearly independent possible color states for the gluons, that are represented by the Gell-Mann matrices [3].…”

“…this can occur in the limits of very high density and/or temperature of the nuclear matter [3]. Calculations in perturbative QCD can determine the evolution of the strong coupling as a function of the transfered momentum Q of an interaction [17].…”

“…A heavy-ion program has been created with the purpose of producing the QGP in laboratory, with the aim of studding its properties and exploring the QCD phase The temporal evolution of a high energy heavy-ion collision can be thought as a sequence of steps [3] [21] as described below. The existence of the QGP is an intermediate step of this evolution.…”

“…A phase transition from the color neutral matter to a color deconfined medium is predicted by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) [2][3] when the matter is submitted to conditions of high energy density and temperature as the ones created during relativistic heavy-ion collisions [4]. This new state of matter is called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) [2] [3] and experimental evidences of its creation were already observed in the past in heavy-ion collisions performed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) [5] [6] [7] [8]. ALICE has the purpose of investigating the properties of this color-deconfined strongly-interacting medium by studding the debris of heavy-ion collisions performed at the unprecedented energies generated by LHC.…”