NPA Seminar, Alice Ohlson, Lund University, “Exploring the phase diagram of nuclear matter with heavy-ion collisions”
In ultrarelativistic collisions of heavy nuclei, such as those which take place in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the resulting state is so hot and dense that normal matter melts into its constituent parts, and quarks and gluons are no longer confined into hadrons. Known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), this matter occupies the high-temperature and high-density regime of the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics (QCD).