8 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the XXVIIIth International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2019), Wuhan, China, November 3-9 2019
I review recent developments in the phenomenological study of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) transport properties based on a personal selection of results that were presented at Quark Matter 2019. The constraints on the temperature dependence of QGP shear and bulk viscosity are summarized. I discuss new theory advancements towards more realistic 3D dynamical simulations of heavy-ion collisions at finite baryon density. The challenges and opportunities of applying hydrodynamics to small collision systems are highlighted.
In these proceedings I review recent developments concerning the hydrodynamic description of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). I report on the progress towards more realistic simulations and discuss new features about the QGP transport coefficients of the hot (and baryon dense) medium formed in heavy ion collisions. A brief discussion is included on the applicability of hydrodynamics and its extension to the far-from-equilibrium regime.
These conferences proceedings summarize the experimental findings obtained in small collision systems at the LHC, as presented in the special session on "QGP in small systems?" at the Quark Matter 2015 conference. (The arXiv version is significantly longer than the printed proceedings, with more details and a short discussion.)
We present an overview of bottomonium spectral functions in the quark-gluon plasma, obtained by the FASTSUM collaboration, using lattice QCD simulations with two light quark flavours on anisotropic lattices. The bottom quark is treated nonrelativistically. While we find that the S wave ground states survive up to the highest temperature we consider, we have strong indications that P wave states melt immediately above Tc.
There is now a substantial body of evidence that a deconfined quark-gluon plasma is created in ultrarelativistic collisions of heavy nuclei. Some key observables which are used to gauge the production of the quark-gluon plasma are the hadronic spectra and multiplicities across many species, azimuthal anisotropies in the production of various hadrons, jet quenching, photon/dilepton production, and heavy quarkonium suppression. A key question in the study of the quark-gluon plasma is what happens to these observables as one changes the system size. In particular, it is very interesting to study …
We overview the current status and recent developments on initial conditions in ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions. Specifically, we look at the progress in understanding the role of sub-nucleonic fluctuations in large and small collision systems. Next, we review the current ideas of going beyond boost invariant initial conditions and introducing physically motivated rapidity fluctuations at RHIC and LHC energies. Finally, we discuss the time evolution of initial stages and the matching between different descriptions of the QGP.
The self-consistent quasiparticle model has been successful in studying QCD thermodynamics. In this model, the medium effects are taken into account by considering quarks and gluons as quasiparticles with temperature-dependent masses which are proportional to the plasma frequency. The present work involves the extension of this model in the presence of magnetic fields. We have included the effect of the magnetic field by considering relativistic Landau Levels. The quasiparticle masses are then found to be dependent on both temperature and magnetic field. The thermomagnetic mass thus defined al…
The strong suppression of heavy quarkonia is a good indicator that one has generated a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in an ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision. Recent advancements in first principles calculations of the heavy quark potential provide additional insight into this suppression and can be used to further pin down the in-medium properties of the QGP. Realistic 3+1d dissipative hydrodynamical models can be used to simulate the QGP and, with bottomonium as a probe, one can make inferences for the initial temperature of the QGP and other phenomenological parameters such as the shear visco…
We explore the system size dependence of heavy-quark-QGP interaction by studying the heavy flavor meson suppression and elliptic flow in Pb-Pb, Xe-Xe, Ar-Ar and O-O collisions at the LHC. The space-time evolution of the QGP is simulated using a (3+1)-dimensional viscous hydrodynamic model, while the heavy-quark-QGP interaction is described by an improved Langevin approach that includes both collisional and radiative energy loss inside a thermal medium. Within this framework, we provides a reasonable description of the $D$ meson suppression and flow coefficients in Pb-Pb collisions, as well as …
The method of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is applied for ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The SPH method has several advantages in studying event-by-event fluctuations, which attract much attention in looking for quark gluon plasma (QGP) formation, because it gives a rather simple scheme for solving hydrodynamical equations. Using initial conditions for Au+Au collisions at RHIC energy produced by NeXus event generator, we solve the hydrodynamical equation in event-by-event basis and study the fluctuations of hadronic observables such as dN/dy due to the initial conditions. In…
Momentum space anisotropy present in the quark and gluon distribution functions in relativistic heavy ion collisions induces Chromo-Weibel instability in the hot QCD medium created therein. The impact of the Chromo-Weibel instability on the dynamics of a heavy-quark (HQ) traversing in the QGP medium is investigated within the framework of kinetic theory by studying the momentum and temperature behavior of HQ drag and diffusion coefficients. The physics of anisotropy is captured in an effective Vlasov term in the transport equation. The effects of the instability are handled by making a relatio…
We first discuss, on a no-QGP basis, the two prominent indications of (a) enhanced strangeness production and of (b) anomalous $J/ψ$-suppression: We elaborate in particular on a recent idea of antihyperon production solely by multi-mesonic reactions. As a possible source for an enhanced dissociation of $c \bar{c}$ pairs we summarize the findings within the 'early'-comover absorption scenario of prehadronic string excitations. As an exotic candidate we then finally adress the stochastic formation of so called disoriented chiral condensates: An experimentally feasible DCC, if it does exist, has …
Deformation and orientation effects on compression, elliptic flow and particle production in uranium on uranium collisions (UU) at relativistic energies are studied within the transport model ART. The density compression in tip-tip UU collisions is found to be about 30% higher and lasts approximately 50% longer than in body-body or spherical UU reactions. The body-body UU collisions have the unique feature that the nucleon elliptic flow is the highest in the most central collisions and remain a constant throughout the reaction. We point out that the tip-tip UU collisions are more probable to c…
In the canonical picture of the evolution of the quark-gluon plasma during a high-energy heavy-ion collision, quarks are produced in two waves. The first is during the first fm/c of the collision, when gluons thermalize into the QGP. After a roughly isentropic expansion that roughly conserves the number of quarks, a second wave ensues at hadronization, 5-10 fm/c into the collision. Since each hadron contains at least two quarks, the majority of quark production occurs at this later time. For each quark produced in a heavy-ion collision, an anti-quark of the same flavor is created at the same p…
Understanding the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that is produced in ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions has been one of the top priorities of the heavy ion program at the LHC. Energetic jets are produced and subsequently quenched in the collisions. Such jet quenching phenomena provide promising tools to probe the medium properties by studying the modification of jets due to the medium interactions. Significant modifications of jet shapes have been measured. In this talk we focus on the calculation of jet shapes in both proton-proton and lead-lead collisions using soft-co…
The transition from hadronic to partonic degrees of freedom in the course of a relativistic heavy-ion collision is described by the microscopic covariant Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach. Studying Pb+Pb reactions from 40 to 158 AGeV and comparing the PHSD results to those of the Hadron-String Dynamics (HSD) approach without a phase transition to the QGP, we observe that the existence of the partonic phase has a sizable influence on the transverse mass distribution of final kaons due to the repulsive partonic mean fields. Furthermore, we find a significant effect of the Q…
We study the heavy quark scattering on partons of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) being especially interested in the collisional (elastic) scattering processes of heavy quarks on quarks and gluons. We calculate the different cross sections for perturbative partons (massless on-shell particles in the vacuum) and for dynamical quasi-particles (off-shell particles in the QGP medium as described by the dynamical quasi-particles model "DQPM") using the leading order Born diagrams. Our results show clearly the effect of a finite parton mass and width on the perturbative elastic $(q(g) Q \rightarrow q (…
The nuclear symmetry energy is a fundamental quantity important for studying the structure of systems as diverse as the atomic nucleus and the neutron star. Considerable efforts are being made to experimentally extract the symmetry energy and its dependence on nuclear density and temperature. In this article, we review experimental studies carried out up-to-date and their current status.
In this review, we present an up-to-date phenomenological summary of research developments in the physics of the Quark--Gluon Plasma (QGP). A short historical perspective and theoretical motivation for this rapidly developing field of contemporary particle physics is provided. In addition, we introduce and discuss the role of the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) ground state, non-perturbative and lattice QCD results on the QGP properties, as well as the transport models used to make a connection between theory and experiment. The experimental part presents the selected results on bulk observables,…
Jet energy transported to quark-gluon plasma during jet-medium interaction excites the QGP medium and creates energetic thermal partons -- recoil particles or recoils. Modification of the jet structure in heavy ion collisions is studied using \textsc{martini}, in which recoil simulation is enabled. In large systems such as central Pb-Pb collisions, the recoil effect is expected to be critical due to strong jet-medium interaction. We show the results of the jet mass function and jet shape function are improved when the recoil particles are included in the reconstructed jets. We conclude that th…
Heavy flavor probes are sensitive to the properties of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A huge amount of effort has been devoted to studying different aspects of the heavy-ion collisions using heavy flavor particles. In this work, we study the dynamics of heavy quark transport in the QGP medium using the rapidity dependence of heavy flavor observables. We calculate the nuclear modification of $\text{B}$ and $\text{D}$ meson spectra as well as spectra of leptons from heavy flavor decays in the rapidity range $[-4.0,4.0]$. We use an implementation of th…
Experiments on high-energy heavy-ion collisions reveal the formation and some intriguing properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), a new phase of matter predicted by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the quantum field theory of strong interactions. The phenomenological success of relativistic hydrodynamic simulations with remarkably weak shear viscosity, modeling QGP as an almost perfect fluid, are in favor of the occurrence of a strongly-coupled QGP expanding and cooling during the reaction. A derivation of these features in QCD at strong coupling is still lacking and represents a very intricat…
A discussion on the electrical conductivity of the quark-gluon plasma as determined by lattice QCD is given. After a reminder of basic definitions and expectations, various methods for spectral reconstruction are reviewed, including the use of Ansätze and sum rules, the Maximum Entropy and Backus-Gilbert methods, and Tikhonov regularisation. A comprehensive overview of lattice QCD results obtained so far is given, including a comparison of the different lattice formulations. A noticeable consistency for the conductivities obtained is seen, in spite of the differences in the lattice setups and …
