Research report 2003 - Max Planck Institute for Physics

Evidence for Quark Matter in High-Energy Collisions of Heavy Atomic Nuclei

Authors
Eckardt, Volker; Putschke, Jörn; Schmitz, Norbert; Seyboth, Janet; Seyboth, Peter; Simon, Frank
Departments

Prof. Dr. Norbert Schmitz (Prof. Dr. Norbert Schmitz)
MPI für Physik, München

Summary
The energy and matter of the Universe, but also space and time themselves, have originated - according to the present Cosmological Standard Model - in a gigantic Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. Immediately after the Bang, the hadronic matter consisted of an extremely hot and dense gas of quasi-free quarks and gluons - the so called Quark Gluon Plasma - in a tiny space volume. Today, physicists are trying to artificially create and explore this unusual state of matter in high-energy collisions of heavy atomic nuclei with large particle accelerators.

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