No Arabic abstract
One of the primary goals of nuclear physics is studying the phase diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics, where a hypothetical critical point serves as a landmark. A systematic model-data comparison of heavy-ion collisions at center-of-mass energies between 1 and 100 GeV per nucleon is essential for locating the critical point and the phase boundary between the deconfined quark-gluon plasma and the confined hadron resonance gas. At these energies the net baryon density of the system can be high and critical fluctuations can become essential in the presence of the critical point. Simulating their dynamical evolution thus becomes an indispensable part of theoretical modeling. In this thesis we first present the (3+1)-dimensional relativistic hydrodynamic code BEShydro, which solves the equations of motion of second-order Denicol-Niemi-Molnar-Rischke theory, including bulk and shear viscous components as well as baryon diffusion current. We then study the effects caused by the baryon diffusion on the longitudinal dynamics and on the phase diagram trajectories of fluid cells at different space-time rapidities of the system, and how they are affected by critical dynamics near the critical point. We finally explore the evolution of non-hydrodynamic slow processes describing long wavelength critical fluctuations near the critical point, by extending the conventional hydrodynamic description by coupling it to additional explicitly evolving slow modes, and their back-reaction to the bulk matter properties.
We study the evolution of the quark-gluon composition of the plasma created in ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions (uRHICs) employing a partonic transport theory that includes both elastic and inelastic collisions plus a mean fields dynamics associated to the widely used quasi-particle model. The latter, able to describe lattice QCD thermodynamics, implies a chemical equilibrium ratio between quarks and gluons strongly increasing as $Trightarrow T_c$, the phase transition temperature. Accordingly we see in realistic simulations of uRHICs a rapid evolution from a gluon dominated initial state to a quark dominated plasma close to $T_c$. The quark to gluon ratio can be modified by about a factor of $sim 20$ in the bulk of the system and appears to be large also in the high $p_T$ region. We discuss how this aspect, often overflown, can be important for a quantitative study of several key issues in the QGP physics: shear viscosity, jet quenching, quarkonia suppression. Furthermore a bulk plasma made by more than $80%$ of quarks plus antiquarks provides a theoretical basis for hadronization via quark coalescence.
We study charm production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions by using the Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach. The initial charm quarks are produced by the Pythia event generator tuned to fit the transverse momentum spectrum and rapidity distribution of charm quarks from Fixed-Order Next-to-Leading Logarithm (FONLL) calculations. The produced charm quarks scatter in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) with the off-shell partons whose masses and widths are given by the Dynamical Quasi-Particle Model (DQPM) which reproduces the lattice QCD equation-of-state in thermal equilibrium. The relevant cross section are calculated in a consistent way by employing the effective propagators and couplings from the DQPM. Close to the critical energy density of the phase transition, the charm quarks are hadronized into $D$ mesons through coalescence and/or fragmentation depending on transverse momentum. The hadronized $D$ mesons then interact with the various hadrons in the hadronic phase with cross sections calculated in an effective lagrangian approach with heavy-quark spin symmetry. Finally, the nuclear modification factor $rm R_{AA}$ and the elliptic flow $v_2$ of $D^0$ mesons from PHSD are compared with the experimental data from the STAR Collaboration for Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{rm NN}}$ =200 GeV. We find that in the PHSD the energy loss of $D$ mesons at high $p_T$ can be dominantly attributed to partonic scattering while the actual shape of $rm R_{AA}$ versus $p_T$ reflects the heavy quark hadronization scenario, i.e. coalescence versus fragmentation. Also the hadronic rescattering is important for the $rm R_{AA}$ at low $p_T$ and enhances the $D$-meson elliptic flow $v_2$.
Several transport models have been employed in recent years to analyze heavy-flavor meson spectra in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Heavy-quark transport coefficients extracted from these models with their default parameters vary, however, by up to a factor of 5 at high momenta. To investigate the origin of this large theoretical uncertainty, a systematic comparison of heavy-quark transport coefficients is carried out between various transport models. Within a common scheme devised for the nuclear modification factor of charm quarks in a brick medium of a quark-gluon plasma, the systematic uncertainty of the extracted drag coefficient among these models is shown to be reduced to a factor of 2, which can be viewed as the smallest intrinsic systematical error band achievable at present time. This indicates the importance of a realistic hydrodynamic evolution constrained by bulk hadron spectra and of heavy-quark hadronization for understanding the final heavy-flavor hadron spectra and extracting heavy-quark drag coefficient. The transverse transport coefficient is less constrained due to the influence of the underlying mechanism for heavy-quark medium interaction. Additional constraints on transport models such as energy loss fluctuation and transverse-momentum broadening can further reduce theoretical uncertainties in the extracted transport coefficients.
We argue that an expanding quark-gluon plasma has an anomalous viscosity, which arises from interactions with dynamically generated colour fields. The anomalous viscosity dominates over the collisional viscosity for large velocity gradients or weak coupling. This effect may provide an explanation for the apparent near perfect liquidity of the matter produced in nuclear collisions at RHIC without the assumption that it is a strongly coupled state.
We investigate the hadron production from the vortical quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions. Based on the quark-coalescence and statistical hadronization models, we show that total hadron yields summed over the spin components are enhanced by the local vorticity with quadratic dependence. The enhancement factor amounts to be a few percent and may be detectable within current experimental sensitivities. We also show that the effect is stronger for hadrons with larger spin, and thus propose a new signature of the local vorticity, which may be detected by the yield ratio of distinct hadron species having different spins such as $phi$ and $eta$. The vorticity dependence of hadron yields seems robust, with consistent predictions in both of the hadron production mechanisms for reasonable values of the vorticity strength estimated for heavy-ion collisions.