Dr. Zvi Citron,Weizmann Institute of Science

Date: 
Tue, 26/11/201312:00-13:00
Location: 
The Moadon room at Pavilion 9, Racah Institute of Physics
"Recent Results from Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions":
Relativistic heavy ion collisions seek to create, in a controlled setting, the conditions present in the universe only a fraction of a second after the big bang. In this brief early moment, the fundamental constituents of matter, quarks and gluons, existed as the relevant degrees of freedom rather than being bound into hadrons as they are today. Heavy ion colliders, in particular the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, collide heavy particles with such force that an energy density is reached which rivals that of the early universe. Since the start of RHIC running in 2000, studying this hot dense medium, dubbed the 'quark gluon plasma', has revealed many insights about matter under extreme conditions and the strong force which governs the interactions of quarks and gluons. In 2010 the LHC began producing heavy ion collisions, and has yielded new and often more precise information. This talk will present a brief history of heavy ion collision measurements and a discussion some of the recent and exciting results.