2015/01/25 by A. Adare, Adare, A., S. Afanasiev +551 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #FOS: Physical sciences #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Scientific Computing and Data Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1501.06197
openalex publication_date 2015/01/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this document the PHENIX collaboration proposes a major upgrade to the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. This upgrade, sPHENIX, enables an extremely rich jet and beauty quarkonia physics program addressing fundamental questions about the nature of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP), discovered experimentally at RHIC to be a perfect fluid. The startling dynamics of the QGP on fluid-like length scales is an emergent property of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), seemingly implicit in the Lagrangian but stubbornly hidden from view. QCD is an asymptotically free theory, but how QCD manifests as a strongly coupled fluid with specific shear viscosity near TC, as low as allowed by the uncertainty principle, is as fundamental an issue as that of how confinement itself arises.