Heavy Ion Collisions

Dear Colleagues,

The main goal of heavy ion collisions is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at the highest energy densities that have been reached so far in the laboratory. In such a condition, an extreme phase of matter—called the quark-gluon plasma—is formed. Our universe is thought to have been in such a primordial state for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The properties of such a phase are key issues for quantum chromodynamics, the understanding of confinement–deconfinement, and chiral phase transitions.

In contrast to the expectations that the QGP would have properties similar to the almost ideal, weakly coupled gas of quarks and gluons, the experimental results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have shown that a hot, strongly interacting, nearly perfect, and almost opaque liquid was produced in central Au–Au collisions at the greatest RHIC energy.

The first collisions of lead nuclei, delivered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the end of 2010, at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair,  = 2.76 TeV, marked the beginning of a new era in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion physics. The study of the properties of the produced hot and dense strongly-interacting matter at these unprecedented energies is currently experimentally being pursued by all four big LHC experiments—ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. The aim of this Special Issue is to present the most recent results on the topic of heavy ion physics in both theory and experiment.

Prof. Dr. Maria Vasileiou
Guest Editor

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