Physics Colloquium, April 20, 2010
The Fluid Nature of Quark-Gluon Plasma W.A. Zajc

Columbia University

Collisions of heavy nuclei at very high energies explore the phase transformation to sub-nucleonic degrees of freedom which is predicted to occur at temperatures in excess of ~ 10^{12} K. Such a state, often referred to as a quark-gluon plasma, is thought to have been the dominant form of matter in the universe in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. While data from Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) clearly demonstrate that these very high temperatures and densities have been achieved, there is also compelling evidence that the matter does not behave as a quasi-ideal state of free quarks and gluons. Rather, its behavior is that of a dense fluid with very low kinematic viscosity, approaching a conjectured viscosity bound obtained via string theory methods. As such, the matter produced at RHIC may be the most perfect fluid ever studied in the laboratory.

Dr. Zajc's Web Site

4:00 p.m., Physics Research Building (PRB), Room 1080

Reception at 3:45 p.m., Atrium, PRB