FastTh · Fast Thermalization of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Fast Thermalization of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Understanding the properties of extreme phases of nuclear matter is one of the major challenges in theoretical physics. Matter under such extreme conditions was present in the very early universe - a millisecond after the big bang - and is nowadays produced in heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, USA and the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland in the form of the Quark Gluon Plasma. This extreme phase of matter is an almost perfect fluid due to its extremely low viscosity. The objectives of the project have been to elucidate how such a fluid is created and what its properties are. We have been using cutting edge numerical simulations carried out on European Supercomputers to elucidate the formation of the hot viscous plasma under controlled initial conditions. The project is an important step beyond the state-of-the-art models which assumed certain symmetries that are not present in real-life quark gluon plasmas by introducing a source that breaks these symmetries in a controlled manner. The results we find are highly exciting as they show that the creation of the plasma is very fast even in this more realistic setup. In addition they pave the way for upcoming studies of the fast creation of the Quark-Gluon plasma.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union