Physics Club: Helen Caines, Yale University, “Exploiting Data from RHIC and the LHC to Study the Quark Gluon Plasma”

Collisions of relativistic heavy ions create a dense, highly inviscid, strongly coupled fluid with quark and gluon degrees of freedom. This fluid is known as the Quark Gluon Plasma.

By exploiting both the versatility of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the extreme energies available at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN we are now exploring how the macroscopic properties of this liquid emerge from the microscopic interactions of quarks and gluons.

In this talk I’ll discuss how the increasing precision of the results from the two facilities are allowing an ever more detailed characterization of this most liquidlike liquid and the conditions required to make it.