Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2010 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics
Volume 55, Number 14
Tuesday–Saturday, November 2–6, 2010; Santa Fe, New Mexico
Session CA: Nuclear Physics at the Extremes |
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Chair: Carl Gagliardi, Texas A&M University Room: Sweeny A |
Thursday, November 4, 2010 8:30AM - 9:06AM |
CA.00001: The Nuclear Physics of High-Energy Cosmic Rays Invited Speaker: High-energy cosmic-ray interactions are the highest energy nuclear interactions on earth, reaching energies far eclipsing the LHC. The incident particles range from protons to iron. They are thus a unique probe of ultra-relativistic ion collisions and also of the incident particles themselves. This talk will introduce the concepts of cosmic-ray interactions and the detectors used to study them, with a special emphasis on the high-energy (TeV) muons produced in the collisions. I will then focus on two topics of special interest to nuclear physicists: perturbative QCD based studies of the cosmic-ray composition and interaction, and studies of forward physics. [Preview Abstract] |
Thursday, November 4, 2010 9:06AM - 9:42AM |
CA.00002: Exploring the QCD landscape with high-energy nuclear collisions Invited Speaker: Physical systems undergo phase transitions when external parameters such as the temperature or density are varied. In general, the phase diagram reflects our understanding how the system reacts to given fundamental interactions. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the basic theory of strong interactions, is no exception and has a phase diagram in four dimension (corresponding to temperature, and 3 chemical potentials for conserved charge, baryon number and strangeness). The two fundamental properties of QCD, related to confinement and chiral symmetry, allow for two corresponding phase transitions in the theory. The QCD scale factor $\sim$ 200 MeV allows for the phase diagram to be explored experimentally by colliding nuclei at varying beam energies. Theoretically it is explored through QCD calculations on lattice by at varying temperature and chemical potentials. In this talk, after briefly discussing the lattice QCD results on phase transition and existence of a critical point in the phase diagram, we will review the related observations from high energy nuclear collision experiments at the LHC and at RHIC. Particular emphasis will be given to recent experimental efforts to locate the critical point. [Preview Abstract] |
Thursday, November 4, 2010 9:42AM - 10:18AM |
CA.00003: QCD Intersections of Nuclear and Particle Physics at the High-Energy Frontier Invited Speaker: The connection between nuclear and particle physics is, arguably, most strongly manifested at the high-energy frontier. In recent years, advances in QCD theory have allowed one to describe with a high degree of accuracy the energetic final states that are experimentally accessible at today's premier hadronic and heavy ion collider facilities. These production processes include jets, heavy flavor, and electroweak bosons and are known at least up to next-to-leading order. Concurrent advances in many-body QCD theory of in-medium parton and hadron dynamics have shed light on a multitude of open questions that range from the wavefunction properties of large nuclei to the stopping power and medium response of strongly-interacting plasmas. Today these theoretical developments come together to provide the foundation for the ongoing and future searches for new forms of matter: from the elusive dark matter that is believed to make up the fabric of our universe to the quark-gluon plasma phase that RHIC and LHC aim to recreate and study under controlled laboratory conditions. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress in the QCD theory of hard probes in light of the exciting upcoming experimental opportunities in particle and nuclear physics to discover new forms of matter and/or to quantify their properties. [Preview Abstract] |
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