Ten microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was a hot and dense soup of quarks and gluons - a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) - with temperatures exceeding a million times the core temperature of the sun. As matter cooled in the expansion, these "colorful" quarks and gluons underwent a transition to colorless protons, neutrons, and other hadrons, eventually forming atomic nuclei, and us. Experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) colliding nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies now routinely recreate this QGP - the study of its properties is an active branch of physics. We discuss how strongly interacting quark-gluon matter is created in these experiments, its properties as a nearly perfect fluid, and concrete interdisciplinary connections thereof across energy scales ranging from ultra-cold atomic gases, to the early universe, and to the physics of black holes.
Zoom link: https://icts-res-in.zoom.us/j/96888799183?pwd=xgg6ycgx1zo1UbjxwDvoevKYsYMOTx.1
Meeting ID: 968 8879 9183
Passcode: 020206