Date : Feb, 8th, 2007      Time : Thursday, 4-5pm      Place : New Science Building 127

Title :Recent Results from RHIC – The Perfect Liquid

Speaker : Gary D. Westfall

Affiliation :Michigan State University  

Abstract : In the past two years, we have witnessed a leap forward in the understanding of high temperature, high density, and strongly interacting matter produced in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Combining measurements of Au+Au, d+Au, and p+p collisions at energies up to 200 GeV per nucleon pair in the center of mass frame, the four RHIC experimental groups, STAR, PHENIX, PHOBOS, and BRAHMS, have produced impressive experimental evidence for the existence of a new form of matter, strongly interacting quark gluon plasma. In this Colloquium, I will present an overview of the latest experimental results from RHIC including evidence for thermalization, hydrodynamic behavior of a perfect fluid, the partonic origin of flow, and jet suppression.  These measurements point to the observation of a hot, dense, strongly interacting matter produced in central Au+Au collisions at the highest available energies. 

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