Page 4: Research news on Relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions constitute a research area focused on studying strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions of temperature and energy density by colliding heavy nuclei (such as Au or Pb) at relativistic energies in accelerators like RHIC and the LHC. The field aims to create and characterize the quark–gluon plasma, probing deconfinement, chiral symmetry restoration, and transport properties of QCD matter. It integrates experimental observables (e.g., flow coefficients, jet quenching, electromagnetic probes, strangeness enhancement) with relativistic hydrodynamics, lattice QCD, and effective theories to constrain the QCD phase diagram and the equation of state relevant to the early universe and compact astrophysical objects.

How 'sticky' is dense nuclear matter?

Colliding heavy atomic nuclei together creates a fluidlike soup of visible matter's fundamental building blocks, quarks and gluons. This soup has very low viscosity—a measure of its "stickiness," or resistance to flow.

ALICE gets the green light for new subdetectors

Two detector upgrades of ALICE, the dedicated heavy-ion physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have recently been approved for installation during the next long shutdown of the LHC, which will take place from ...

Super strong magnetic fields leave imprint on nuclear matter

A new analysis by the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle collider at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, provides the first direct evidence of the ...

How do quark-gluon-plasma fireballs explode into hadrons?

Quark gluon plasma (QGP) is an exciting state of matter that scientists create in a laboratory by colliding two heavy nuclei. These collisions produce a QGP fireball. The fireball expands and cools following the laws of hydrodynamics, ...

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