No Arabic abstract
With the aim of understanding the phase structure of nuclear matter created in high-energy nuclear collisions at finite baryon density, a beam energy scan program has been carried out at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). In this mini-review, most recent experimental results on collectivity, criticality and heavy flavor productions will be discussed. The goal here is to establish the connection between current available data and future heavy-ion collision experiments in a high baryon density region.
We present phi-meson transverse momentum distribution as well as its elliptic flow (v_{2}) measurements in Au + Au collisions at center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair sqrt{s_{NN}} = 7.7, 11.5 and 39 GeV with the data taken from STAR experiment at RHIC in the year 2010. We discuss the energy dependence of phi-meson elliptic flow (v_{2}) and central-to-peripheral nuclear modification factors (R_{CP}). The v_{2} of phi-mesons are compared to those from other hadron species. The implications on partonic-hadronic phase transition are discussed.
In nucleus-nucleus collisions at ultra-relativistic energies matter is formed with initial energy density significantly exceeding the critical energy density for the transition from hadronic to partonic matter. We will review the experimental evidence for this new form of matter - the Quark-Gluon Plasma - from recent experiments at the SPS and RHIC with emphasis on collective behavior, thermalization, and its opacity for fast partons. We will further show that one can determine from the data a fundamental QCD parameter, the critical temperature for the QCD phase transition.
We present a quantitative study of vorticity formation in peripheral ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at sqrt(s)NN = 200 GeV by using the ECHO-QGP numerical code, implementing relativistic dissipative hydrodynamics in the causal Israel-Stewart framework in 3+1 dimensions with an initial Bjorken flow profile. We consider and discuss different definitions of vorticity which are relevant in relativistic hydrodynamics. After demonstrating the excellent capabilities of our code, which proves to be able to reproduce Gubser flow up to 8 fm/c, we show that, with the initial conditions needed to reproduce the measured directed flow in peripheral collisions corresponding to an average impact parameter b=11.6 fm and with the Bjorken flow profile for a viscous Quark Gluon Plasma with eta/s=0.1 fixed, a vorticity of the order of some 10^{-2} c/fm can develop at freezeout. The ensuing polarization of Lambda baryons does not exceed 1.4% at midrapidity. We show that the amount of developed directed flow is sensitive to both the initial angular momentum of the plasma and its viscosity.
We summarize our current understanding of the connection between the QCD phase line and the chemical freeze-out curve as deduced from thermal analyses of yields of particles produced in central collisions between relativistic nuclei.
In this paper, we investigate various ways of defining the initial source eccentricity using the Monte Carlo Glauber (MCG) approach. In particular, we examine the participant eccentricity, which quantifies the eccentricity of the initial source shape by the major axes of the ellipse formed by the interaction points of the participating nucleons. We show that reasonable variation of the density parameters in the Glauber calculation, as well as variations in how matter production is modeled, do not significantly modify the already established behavior of the participant eccentricity as a function of collision centrality. Focusing on event-by-event fluctuations and correlations of the distributions of participating nucleons we demonstrate that, depending on the achieved event-plane resolution, fluctuations in the elliptic flow magnitude $v_2$ lead to most measurements being sensitive to the root-mean-square, rather than the mean of the $v_2$ distribution. Neglecting correlations among participants, we derive analytical expressions for the participant eccentricity cumulants as a function of the number of participating nucleons, $Npart$,keeping non-negligible contributions up to $ordof{1/Npart^3}$. We find that the derived expressions yield the same results as obtained from mixed-event MCG calculations which remove the correlations stemming from the nuclear collision process. Most importantly, we conclude from the comparison with MCG calculations that the fourth order participant eccentricity cumulant does not approach the spatial anisotropy obtained assuming a smooth nuclear matter distribution. In particular, for the Cu+Cu system, these quantities deviate from each other by almost a factor of two over a wide range in centrality.