 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
||
 |
||||||
                |
|
Physics Colloquium, March 7, 2006Hotter, Denser, Faster, Smaller...and Nearly-Perfect: What's the Matter at RHIC?Peter SteinbergBrookhaven National LabCollisions at RHIC have long been expected to create a "Quark-Gluon Plasma" (QGP), where the active degrees of freedom are the quarks and gluons found in the nucleus, rather than the final particles we observe in our detectors. What was surprising, however, was how strongly interacting the degrees of freedom appear to be, making the system produced at RHIC act almost like a perfect fluid, perhaps the most perfect found in nature since the Big Bang. This is a staggering result considering just how small the system is and how little time it has to form. This talk will be an introduction to the basic physics of the QGP and RHIC, with focus on several intriguing results from the recently-ended PHOBOS experiment. 4:00 p.m., Physics Research Building (PRB), Room 1080Reception at 3:45 p.m., Atrium, PRB |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
| |||||
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|||||||
