No Arabic abstract
We performed state-of-the-art QCD effective kinetic theory simulations of chemically equilibrating QGP in longitudinally expanding systems. We find that chemical equilibration takes place after hydrodynamization, but well before local thermalization. By relating the transport properties of QGP and the system size we estimate that hadronic collisions with final state multiplicities $dN_text{ch}/deta > 10^2$ live long enough to reach approximate chemical equilibrium for all collision systems. Therefore we expect the saturation of strangeness enhancement to occur at the same multiplicity in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions.
Heavy-ion collisions at low beam energies explore the high density regime of strongly-interacting matter. The dynamical evolution of these collisions can be successfully described by hadronic transport approaches. In March 2019, the HADES collaboration has taken data for AgAg collisions at $E_{rm Kin}=1.58A$ GeV and in this work, we provide predictions for particle production and spectra within the Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons (SMASH) approach. The multiplicities and spectra of strange and non-strange particles follow the expected trends as a function of system size. In particular, in AuAu collisions, much higher yields of double-strange baryons were observed experimentally than expected from a thermal model. Therefore, we incorporate a previously suggested mechanism to produce $Xi$ baryons via rare decays of high mass $N^*$ resonances and predict the multiplicities. In addition, we predict the invariant mass spectrum for dilepton emission and explore the most important sources of dileptons above 1 GeV, that are expected to indicate the temperature of the medium. Interestingly, the overall dilepton emission is very similar to the one in AuAu collisions at $1.23 A$ GeV, a hint that the smaller system at a higher energy behaves very similar to the larger system at lower beam energy.
We compute the homogeneous limit of non-hydrodynamic quasinormal modes (QNMs) of a phenomenologically realistic Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton (EMD) holographic model for the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) that is able to: i) {it quantitatively} describe state-of-the-art lattice results for the QCD equation of state and higher order baryon susceptibilities with $2+1$ flavors and physical quark masses up to highest values of the baryon chemical potential currently reached in lattice simulations; ii) describe the nearly perfect fluidity of the strongly coupled QGP produced in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions; iii) give a very good description of the bulk viscosity extracted via some recent Bayesian analyzes of hydrodynamical descriptions of heavy ion experimental data. This EMD model has been recently used to predict the location of the QCD critical point in the QCD phase diagram, which was found to be within the reach of upcoming low energy heavy ion collisions. The lowest quasinormal modes of the $SO(3)$ rotationally invariant quintuplet, triplet, and singlet channels evaluated in the present work provide upper bounds for characteristic equilibration times describing how fast the dense medium returns to thermal equilibrium after being subjected to small disturbances. We find that the equilibration times in the different channels come closer to each other at high temperatures, although being well separated at the critical point. Moreover, in most cases, these equilibration times decrease with increasing baryon chemical potential while keeping temperature fixed.
The speed of sound ($c_s$) is studied to understand the hydrodynamical evolution of the matter created in heavy-ion collisions. The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) formed in heavy-ion collisions evolves from an initial QGP to the hadronic phase via a possible mixed phase. Due to the system expansion in a first order phase transition scenario, the speed of sound reduces to zero as the specific heat diverges. We study the speed of sound for systems, which deviate from a thermalized Boltzmann distribution using non-extensive Tsallis statistics. In the present work, we calculate the speed of sound as a function of temperature for different $q$-values for a hadron resonance gas. We observe a similar mass cut-off behaviour in non-extensive case for $c^{2}_s$ by including heavier particles, as is observed in the case of a hadron resonance gas following equilibrium statistics. Also, we explicitly present that the temperature where the mass cut-off starts, varies with the $q$-parameter which hints at a relation between the degree of non-equilibrium and the limiting temperature of the system. It is shown that for values of $q$ above approximately 1.13 all criticality disappear in the speed of sound, i.e. the decrease in the value of the speed of sound, observed at lower values of $q$, disappears completely.
Using a model based on the Color Glass Condensate framework and the dilute-dense factorization, we systematically study the azimuthal angular correlations between a heavy flavor meson and a light reference particle in proton-nucleus collisions. The obtained second harmonic coefficients (also known as the elliptic flows) for $J/psi$ and $D^0$ agree with recent experimental data from the LHC. We also provide predictions for the elliptic flows of $Upsilon$ and $B$ meson, which can be measured in the near future at the LHC. This work can shed light on the physics origin of the collectivity phenomenon in the collisions of small systems.
Relativistic heavy-ion experiments have observed similar quenching effects for (prompt) $D$ mesons compared to charged hadrons for transverse momenta larger than 6-8~GeV, which remains a mystery since heavy quarks typically lose less energies in quark-gluon plasma than light quarks and gluons. Recent measurements of the nuclear modification factors of $B$ mesons and $B$-decayed $D$ mesons by the CMS Collaboration provide a unique opportunity to study the flavor hierarchy of jet quenching. Using a linear Boltzmann transport model combined with hydrodynamics simulation, we study the energy loss and nuclear modification for heavy and light flavor jets in high-energy nuclear collisions. By consistently taking into account both quark and gluon contributions to light and heavy flavor hadron productions within a next-to-leading order perturbative QCD framework, we obtain, for the first time, a satisfactory description of the experimental data on the nuclear modification factors for charged hadrons, $D$ mesons, $B$ mesons and $B$-decayed $D$ mesons simultaneously over a wide range of transverse momenta (8-300~GeV). This presents a solid solution to the flavor puzzle of jet quenching and constitutes a significant step towards the precision study of jet-medium interaction. Our study predicts that at transverse momenta larger than 30-40~GeV, $B$ mesons also exhibit similar suppression effects to charged hadrons and $D$ mesons, which may be tested by future measurements.