Salient Features of Hadronization, Deconfinement and Heavy Quark Probes at RHIC

This talk serves as an introduction to the Heavy-Flavor session of the XXXIII International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics. A major focus of this session is on the production of heavy quarks. The talks which follow review the latest results on heavy quark production in strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions, as well as some of the physics of the heavy quarks themselves. This talk emphasizes what we can learn from the production measurements, both about underlying...

The formation of hadrons is a fundamental process in nature that can be investigated at particle colliders. As several recent findings demonstrate, with \ensuremath{\mathrm{e^+e^-}}\xspace collisions as a "vacuum-like" reference at one extreme, and central AA as a dense, extended-size system characterized by flow and local equilibrium at the opposite extreme, different collision systems offer a lever arm that can be exploited to probe with a range of heavy-flavour hadron spec...

The production of quarkonium in heavy ion collisions is studied at RHIC and LHC energies. General arguments indicate that, due to initial production of multiple quark pairs in each central collision, the final population of quarkonium may exhibit significant enhancements over straightforward extrapolation of behavior at SPS energy. Explicit calculations based on both a statistical hadronization picture and a kinetic formation mechanism in a deconfined state verify these gener...

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) came online in 2000, and the last three years have provided a wealth of new experimental data and theoretical work in this new energy frontier for nuclear physics. The transition from quarks and gluons bound into hadrons to a deconfined quark-gluon plasma is expected to occur at these energies, and the effort to understand the time evolution of these complex systems has been significantly advanced. The heavy ion parallel session talk...

These proceedings represent a brief overview of the exciting physics coming out from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The experimental results from BRAHMS, PHOBOS, PHENIX and STAR indicate a strongly-coupled state of matter that can only be described on the partonic level. Here we review some of the latest experimental results as presented at the meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society in Ri...

I present here a concise review of the experimental results obtained at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which shed light on the hot and dense quark gluon matter produced at these high temperature and density conditions.

We show that hadron production in relativistic heavy ion collisions at transverse momenta larger than 2 GeV/c can be explained by the competition of two different hadronization mechanisms. Above 5 GeV/c hadron production can be described by fragmentation of partons that are created perturbatively. Below 5 GeV/c recombination of partons from the dense and hot fireball dominates. This can explain some of the surprising features of RHIC data like the constant baryon-to-meson rat...

We review the physics of heavy quark and quarkonium production in high energy hadronic collisions. We discuss the status of the theoretical calculations and compare the current results with the most recent measurements from the Tevatron collider experiments.

We describe the current status of the heavy ion research program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The new suite of experiments and the collider energies have opened up new probes of the medium created in the collisions. Our review focuses on the experimental discoveries to date at RHIC and their interpretation in the light of our present theoretical understanding of the dynamics of relativistic heavy ion collisions and of the structure of strongly interacting ma...

High energy heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) produce a novel medium characterized by an initial energy density over an order of magnitude above the expected phase transformation value and that then evolves as a nearly inviscid liquid. Probing the medium with auto-generated particles is a key methodology to quantitatively determine the medium properties. Pairs of heavy quarks are an excellent probe since their spatial separation to form variou...