“Exploring the Hottest Matter in the Universe with Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions”

Dennis Perepelitsa

University of Colorado Boulder

Monday, February 17th at 4:00pm

120 Engineering (Hammond Auditorium)

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland accelerate large, fully-ionized nuclei to very near the speed of light. When the nuclei are steered into a head-on collision, the energy density and temperature in the collision zone become so large that the fundamental quark and gluon particles are liberated from their confined state and form a new phase of matter called a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Although exotic to our everyday experience, QGP is the form which comprised all the matter in our universe during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. [Read more…]