Dynamical description of Heavy Ion Collisions
A research team at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research is reconstructing the conditions following the Big Bang using high-performance computing.
An understanding of the structure of our universe is an intriguing topic of research in our Millennium, combining the efforts of physicists working in different fields of astrophysics, cosmology, and heavy-ion physics. Experiments on relativistic heavy-ion collisions allow us to recreate the conditions of our universe directly after the Big Bang - when matter was in a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase at very high temperature T and almost zero baryon density (or chemical potential μB) - and to follow its later expansion stages, where matter hadronized into protons and neutrons, the building blocks of nuclei, and finally formed stars and galaxies by gravity.
Our goal is to develop a consistent model (called PHSD: Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics) for the dynamical description of strongly interacting matter created in heavy-ion collisions on a fully microscopic level, i.e., based on the interactions of hadronic and partonic degrees of freedom. The PHSD approach allows us to “penetrate inside” the hot and dense matter of heavy-ion collisions and study its properties in comparison with experimental data.
The figure illustrates the time evolution of central Au+Au collisions (upper row, sectional view) at an invariant collisional energy of 19.6 GeV within PHSD. The middle row shows the local temperature T, while the lower row displays the baryon chemical potential μB extracted from PHSD at different times.
Researching group: Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD)
The illustration shows the temporal development of central Au+Au collisions as described in the article.
The illustration shows the temporal development of central Au+Au collisions as described in the article.