Friday, May 27, 2005, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
O. Drapier, LLR-Ecole Polytechnique
Abstract:
Lattice QCD calculations predict that, for sufficiently high
temperatures and/or energy densities, nuclear matter should undergo a
phase transition towards a state called "quark-gluon plasma" (QGP). This
form of matter, consisting of an extended volume of interacting quarks,
antiquarks and gluons, is thought to have existed a few microseconds
after the Big Bang.
The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC, Brookhaven, N.Y.) is dedicated to the search for QGP, by colliding heavy nuclei (up to gold) at 200 GeV per nucleon-nucleon interaction, extending the physics program developped at the Brokhaven-AGS and CERN-SPS for lower incident energies. The results obtained by the four RHIC experiments show strong evidence for the creation of a strongly interacting partonic medium, which could be considered as a nearly ideal liquid.