Date: Friday, March 9, 2017 at 4pm
Location: 223 Herman Brown Hall, Rice University
Abstract: As nuclear matter is compressed and heated to extreme temperatures, eventually a point is reached where the quarks and gluons are no longer bound within their hadrons but are instead constituents of a larger mass of deconfined matter, a QCD plasma. This matter interacts through the bare color force. Theoretical studies of the properties of matter require Lattice QCD. The current understanding is that the nature of the transition from a state of hot hadronic gas to a plasma depends on the baryon chemical potential, which is a measure of the ratio of quarks to anti-quarks. A cross-over transition is expected at low baryon chemical potential, while at high baryon chemical potential the transition is expected to be first order. A systematic study of heavy-ion collisions across a broad range of beam energy can create QCD plasma with a broad spectrum of chemical potentials. The RHIC facility has embarked on such a study to try to experimentally map out the nature of the QCD phase diagram. Follow-up studies are planned in 2019 and 2020. The energy range of this follow-up scan can be extended with a fixed-target program.