Webpages tagged with «QCD»

Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions offer a unique opportunity to study the nuclear phase diagram at high temperatures and densities. The matter under such extreme conditions probably has existed in the early Universe within the first few fm/c after the Big Bang. Therefore, it is very tempting to investigate the properties of the Little Big Bang in the laboratory, and to search for a new state of matter, predicted by the fundamental theory of strong interactions - Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), namely, a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons or quark-gluon plasma (QGP).

The mission of the HENP project is the exploration of the behaviour of nuclear matter under extreme conditions and in particular the Quark-Gluon Plasma, which existed for about a microsecond after the Big Bang, and which can be recreated in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions in the laboratory. The HENP project uses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the dedicated heavy-ion experiment ALICE to produce and study the Quark-Gluon Plasma.