Freezeout-conditions in heavy ion collisions

A central goal of experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is the exploration of the phase diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics at non zero temperature and baryon chemical potential. In particular, a new, systematic Beam Energy Scan is being prepared at RHIC in order to search for the QCD critical point, a second order phase transition point that has been postulated to exist at non- vanishing baryon chemical potential in the phase diagram of QCD. The measurement of fluctuations of conserved charges, e.g. baryon number B, electric charge Q and strangeness S, play a crucial role in the search for this critical behaviour and the exploration of the QCD phase diagram in general. The proposed project aims at the numerical calculation of these fluctuation quantities to obtain a better understanding of the experiments through a detailed comparison to lattice QCD results.

  • Supervisors: Christian Schmidt, Frithjof Karsch (University of Bielefeld)