2023-04-11 - 2023-04-14
Aleksas Mazeliauskas
Heidelberg University
Microseconds after the Big Bang, no nucleons yet existed, and the Universe was filled with plasma made of quarks and gluons--the fundamental degrees of freedom of strong interactions. Astonishingly, the high-energy collisions of heavy nuclei recreate the same extreme conditions on Earth. The heavy-ion experiments at BNL’s Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), therefore, provide us with a unique opportunity to study the non-equilibrium evolution of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)---the theory of strong force. In these lectures, I will review how different effective descriptions of QCD (classical-statistical field theory, QCD kinetic theory and viscous hydrodynamics) allow us to investigate the creation and thermalisation of QCD matter.
