Speaker
Prof.
Sangyong Jeon
Description
In the past two decades, creation and investigation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) have been {\em the} most important goal of the high-energy nuclear physics community.
With two powerful heavy ion colliders in operation - RHIC and the LHC, we have learned much about this fascinating new state of matter which existed in bulk only about a micro-second after the big-bang.
QGP is hottest matter ever seen - its temperature exceeds at least two trillion kelvin so that the hadrons must dissolve.
QCD is densest matter ever seen - a cubic centimeter of QGP weighs about 10 times the whole population of earth.
Yet, it is not hot enough and dense enough that perturbative QCD can be applied.
Furthermore, QGP we create in relativistic heavy ion collisions is not static. It evolves into the ordinary hadronic matter within a few fm/c where as the usual theoretical tools such as the Feynman diagrams are not really formulated to deal with evolving systems. Yet, theorists have met the challenge of devising ways to study this system with confidence and learned much about the properties of QGP and how it is created in relativistic heavy ion collisions.
In this lecture, I will emphasize the need to understand the different time and length scales that makes it possible for us to use certain approximations and also emphasize the need to understand {\em both} the soft and the hard physics of the relativistic heavy ion collisions and interactions between them. In particular, the theory and practice of QGP hydrodynamics and the jets and photons that propagate through QGP will be discussed. Due to the time restriction, this lecture will be more about {\em qualitative} understanding rather than the details of calculations.
