The strong suppression of bottomonia production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a smoking gun for the creation of a deconfined quark-gluon plasma (QGP). In this proceedings contribution, I review recent work that aims to provide a more
comprehensive and systematic understanding of bottomonium dynamics in the QGP through the use of pNRQCD and an open quantum systems approach. This approach allows one to evolve the heavy-quarkonium reduced density matrix, taking into account non-unitary effective Hamiltonian evolution of the wave-function and quantum jumps between different angular momentum and color states. In the case of a strong coupled QGP in which E << T,m_D << 1/a_0, the corresponding evolution equation is Markovian and can therefore be mapped to a Lindblad evolution equation. To solve the resulting Lindblad equation, we make use of a stochastic unraveling called the quantum trajectories algorithm and couple the non-abelian quantum evolution to a realistic 3+1D viscous hydrodynamical background. Using a large number of Monte-Carlo sampled bottomonium trajectories, we make predictions for bottomonium R_AA and elliptic flow as a function of centrality and transverse momentum and compare to data collected by the ALICE, ATLAS, and CMS collaborations.
A systematic analysis of correlations between different orders of $p_T$-differential flow is presented, including mode coupling effects in flow vectors, correlations between flow angles (a.k.a. event-plane correlations), and correlations between flow
magnitudes, all of which were previously studied with integrated flows. We find that the mode coupling effects among differential flows largely mirror those among the corresponding integrated flows, except at small transverse momenta where mode coupling contributions are small. For the fourth- and fifth-order flow vectors $V_4$ and $V_5$ we argue that the event plane correlations can be understood as the ratio between the mode coupling contributions to these flows and and the flow magnitudes. We also find that for $V_4$ and $V_5$ the linear response contribution scales linearly with the corresponding cumulant-defined eccentricities but not with the standard eccentricities.
Radial flow can be directly extracted from the azimuthal distribution of mean transverse rapidity. We apply the event-plane method and the two-particle correlation method to estimate the anisotropic Fourier coefficient of the azimuthal distribution o
f mean transverse rapidity. Using the event sample generated by a multiphase transport model with string melting, we show that both methods are effective. For the two-particle correlation method to be reliable, the mean number of particles in an azimuthal bin must be above a certain threshold. Using these two methods, anisotropic radial flow can be estimated in a model-independent way in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.
The roles of isospin asymmetry in nuclei and neutron stars are investigated using a range of potential and field-theoretical models of nucleonic matter. The parameters of these models are fixed by fitting the properties of homogeneous bulk matter and
closed-shell nuclei. We discuss and unravel the causes of correlations among the neutron skin thickness in heavy nuclei, the pressure of beta-equilibrated matter at a density of 0.1 fm$^{-3}$, and the radii of moderate mass neutron stars. The influence of symmetry energy on observables in heavy-ion collisions is summarized.
Nuclei undergo a phase transition in nuclear reactions according to a caloric curve determined by the amount of entropy. Here, the generation of entropy is studied in relation to the size of the nuclear system.