Heavy Ions at the LHC: A Quest for Quark-gluon Plasma

Abstract

Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, predicts a transition of the usual matter to a new phase of matter, called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), at sufficiently high temperatures. The non-perturbative technique of defining a theory on a space-time lattice has been used to obtain this and other predictions about the nature of QGP. Heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN can potentially test these predictions and thereby test our theoretical understanding of confinement. This brief review aims at providing a glimpse of both these aspects of QGP.

Developments in high energy theory

“…As with the earlier discussion on confinement, the duality here is best understood for a fictitious fluid made up of the quanta of N = 4 supersymmetric gauge theory rather than true QCD. However, the remarkably useful predictions from this approach make it likely that at least some of the results are applicable to the real world, and that with more sophisticated models it might be possible to study true quark-gluon plasma [81] in this way.…”