We review the evolution of some statistical and thermodynamical quantities measured in difference sizes of high-energy collisions at different energies. We differentiate between intensive and extensive quantities and discuss the importance of their distinguishability in characterizing possible critical phenomena of nuclear collisions at various energies with different initial conditions.
It is shown that hadron abundances in high energy e+e-, pp and p{bar p} collisions, calculated by assuming that particles originate in hadron gas fireballs at thermal and partial chemical equilibrium, are in very good agreement with the data. The fre
eze-out temperature of the hadron gas fireballs turns out to be nearly constant over a large center of mass energy range and not dependent on the initial colliding system. The only deviation from chemical equilibrium resides in the incomplete strangeness phase space saturation. Preliminary results of an analysis of hadron abundances in S+S and S+Ag heavy ion collisions are presented.
The interpretation of quark ($q$)- antiquark ($bar q$) pairs production and the sequential string breaking as tunneling through the event horizon of colour confinement leads to a thermal hadronic spectrum with a universal Unruh temperature, $T simeq
165$ Mev,related to the quark acceleration, $a$, by $T=a/2pi$. The resulting temperature depends on the quark mass and then on the content of the produced hadrons, causing a deviation from full equilibrium and hence a suppression of strange particle production in elementary collisions. In nucleus-nucleus collisions, where the quark density is much bigger, one has to introduce an average temperature (acceleration) which dilutes the quark mass effect and the strangeness suppression almost disappears.
Quarkonium production in high-energy proton (deuteron)-nucleus collisions is investigated in the color glass condensate framework. We employ the color evaporation model assuming that the quark pair produced from dense small-x gluons in the nuclear ta
rget bounds into a quarkonium outside the target. The unintegrated gluon distribution at small Bjorken x in the nuclear target is treated with the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation with running coupling corrections. For the gluons in the proton, we examine two possible descriptions, unintegrated gluon distribution and ordinary collinear gluon distribution. We present the transverse momentum spectrum and nuclear modification factor for J/psi production at RHIC and LHC energies, and those for Upsilon(1S) at LHC energy, and discuss the nuclear modification factor and the momentum broadening by changing the rapidity and the initial saturation scale.
Jet quenching has been used successfully as a hard probe to study properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in high-energy heavy-collisions at both the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We will review recent
progresses in theoretical and phenomenological studies of jet quenching with jet transport models. Special emphasis is given to effects of jet-induced medium response on a wide variety of experimental measurements and their implication on extracting transport properties of the QGP in heavy-ion collisions.