In search of quark gluon plasma in nuclear collisions

Abstract

At high temperatures and densities the nuclear matter undergoes a phase transition to a new state of matter called quark gluon plasma (QGP). This new state of matter which existed in the universe after a few microsecond of the big bang can be created in the laboratory by colliding two nuclei at relativistic energies. In this presentation we will discuss how the the properties of QGP can be extracted by analyzing the spectra of photons, dileptons and heavy flavours produced in nuclear collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies.

Proc. DAE Symposium on Nucl. Phys. Vol 56 (2011) 132