Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions have been used since the early nineties as a tool to create in the laboratory an environment with energy density and temperature close to those existing in Nature immediately after the Big Bang. The aim is to produce and study nuclear matter in which quarks and gluons are no longer bound in hadrons. The experimental programme with Pb ions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) started in 1994 and continued at the Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL) with the advent of the Realivistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the year 2000. The available nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy increased by one order of magnitude from √σNN = 17 GeV at the SPS to √σNN = 200GeV ar RHIC. In this paper, after a concise review of the highlights of the experiments at the SPS and RHIC, the physics perspectives of the heavy-ion programme at the LHC (√σNN = 5.5TeV) will be presented.
Heavy-Ion Physics
MASERA, Massimo
2008-01-01
Abstract
Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions have been used since the early nineties as a tool to create in the laboratory an environment with energy density and temperature close to those existing in Nature immediately after the Big Bang. The aim is to produce and study nuclear matter in which quarks and gluons are no longer bound in hadrons. The experimental programme with Pb ions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) started in 1994 and continued at the Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL) with the advent of the Realivistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the year 2000. The available nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy increased by one order of magnitude from √σNN = 17 GeV at the SPS to √σNN = 200GeV ar RHIC. In this paper, after a concise review of the highlights of the experiments at the SPS and RHIC, the physics perspectives of the heavy-ion programme at the LHC (√σNN = 5.5TeV) will be presented.
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