Title: Nature’s most extreme fluid- the Quark Gluon Plasma

Abstract: The strongest fundamental force of nature generates ~96% of the mass of the visible universe and binds together the building blocks of Quantum Chromodynamics, quarks and gluons, within the proton. At temperatures of a few trillion Kelvin these quarks are gluons strongly interact in an exotic state of matter known at the Quark Gluon Plasma that behaves as a nearly perfect liquid. Collider experiments have been smashing heavy-ions together at nearly the speed of light in order to produce tiny droplets of the Quark Gluon Plasma in the laboratory with a size of the order of trillionth cm.

In this talk I will discuss the “standard model” of the Quark Gluon Plasma that has emerged with the development of relativistic viscous hydrodynamics. With the help of high performance numerical simulations of relativistic viscous hydrodynamics requiring Big Data techniques for statistical analysis, I will show that is now possible to make connections to nuclear structure and understand the limits of the smallest fluid possible using heavy quarks. Future goals of mapping out the Quantum Chromodynamic phase diagram will also be discussed.

Host: Vladimir Skokov