No Arabic abstract
The QCD phase diagram lies at the heart of what the RHIC Physics Program is all about. While RHIC has been operating very successfully at or close to its maximum energy for almost a decade, it has become clear that this collider can also be operated at lower energies down to 5 GeV without extensive upgrades. An exploration of the full region of beam energies available at the RHIC facility is imperative. The STAR detector, due to its large uniform acceptance and excellent particle identification capabilities, is uniquely positioned to carry out this program in depth and detail. The first exploratory beam energy scan (BES) run at RHIC took place in 2010 (Run 10), since several STAR upgrades, most importantly a full barrel Time of Flight detector, are now completed which add new capabilities important for the interesting physics at BES energies. In this document we discuss current proposed measurements, with estimations of the accuracy of the measurements given an assumed event count at each beam energy.
Collisions of lead nuclei have been studied at the CERN SPS since 1994. A review is presented of the evidence for the production of deconfined matter, the location of the energy of the onset of deconfinement and the search for the critical point of stronly interacting matter
With the measurement of several observables at SPS energies that demonstrate non-monotonic behavior as a function of centrality and $sqrt{s_{NN}}$, there is growing interest in pursuing a scan of relativistic heavy ion collisions at low energies at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The capabilities of the PHENIX experiment to take quality measurements at low RHIC energies is described and directly demonstrated with analyses of Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 19.6 GeV and Cu+Cu collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 22.5 GeV. The contribution of upgrades to the PHENIX detector in the upcoming years will also be discussed in the context of a low energy RHIC run.
A general discussion is presented of the possible symmetries responsible for confinement of color and of their evidence in lattice simulations. The consequences on the phase diagram of $QCD$ are also analyzed.
We discuss the potential of light-nuclei measurement in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies for the search of the hypothetical QCD critical end-point. A previous proposal based on neutron density fluctuations has brought appealing experimental evidences of a maximum in a ratio involving tritons, protons and deuterons, ${cal O}_{tpd}$. However these results are difficult to reconcile with the state-of-the-art statistical thermal model predictions. Based on the idea that the QCD critical point can lead to a substantial attraction among nucleons, we propose new ratios involving $^4$He in which the maximum would be more evident. We argue that the experimental extraction is feasible by presenting actual measurements at low and high collision energies. We also illustrate the possible behavior of these ratios at intermediate energies applying the semiclassical method based on flucton paths using preliminary STAR data for ${cal O}_{tpd}$.
We determine the dependence of important parameters for critical fluctuations on temperature and baryon chemical potential in the QCD phase diagram. The analysis is based on an identification of the fluctuations of the order parameter obtained from the Ising model equation of state and the Ginzburg-Landau effective potential approach. The impact of the mapping from Ising model variables to QCD thermodynamics is discussed.