An overview of the communications technology satellite project: Executive summary

An overview of the Communications Technology Satellite (CTS) project, a joint venture between NASA and the Canadian Department of Communications is given. A brief technical description of the CTS spacecraft and its cognate hardware and operations, a history of the CTS project, and a list of the CTS experiments and demonstrations conducted during the course of the project are given

Theory and Phenomenology of Vector Mesons in Medium

Electromagnetic probes promise to be direct messengers of (spectral properties of) hot and dense matter formed in heavy-ion collisions, even at soft momentum transfers essential for characterizing possible phase transitions. We examine how far we have progressed toward this goal by highlighting recent developments, and trying to establish connections between lattice QCD, effective hadronic models and phenomenology of dilepton production.Comment: 8 pages latex incl. 12 ps/eps files; invited plenary talk at Quark Matter 2006 conference, Shanghai (China), Nov. 14-20, 200

Heavy-Quark Probes of the Quark-Gluon Plasma at RHIC

Thermalization and collective flow of charm (c) and bottom (b) quarks in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions are evaluated based on elastic parton rescattering in an expanding quark-gluon plasma (QGP). We show that resonant interactions in a strongly interacting QGP (sQGP), as well as the effects of parton coalescence, can play an essential role in the interpretation of recent data from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC), and thus illuminate the nature of the sQGP and its hadronization. Our main assumption, motivated by recent findings in lattice computations of Quantum Chromodynamics, is the existence of D- and B-meson states in the sQGP, providing resonant cross sections for heavy quarks up to temperatures of sim 2 T_c. Pertinent drag and diffusion coefficients are implemented into a relativistic Langevin simulation to compute transverse-momentum spectra and azimuthal asymmetries (v_2) of b- and c-quarks in Au-Au collisions at RHIC. Hadronization into D- and B-mesons is calculated from a combination of coalescence with light quarks and fragmentation, and associated electron-decay spectra and v_2 are compared to recent RHIC data. We also comment on the relative importance of radiative and elastic energy loss of heavy quarks in the QGP.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, v2: 1 reference updated, v3: replaced comparison to data to more recent data, references added, contents unchange

Theory and Phenomenology of Heavy Flavor at RHIC

We review the problem of heavy-quark diffusion in the Quark-Gluon Plasma and its ramifications for heavy-quark spectra in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. In particular, we attempt to reconcile underlying mechanisms of several seemingly different approaches that have been put forward to explain the large suppression and elliptic flow of non-photonic electron spectra. We also emphasize the importance of a quantitative description of the bulk medium evolution to extract reliable values for the heavy-quark diffusion coefficient.Comment: 8 pages latex, including 10 eps figures; plenary talk at SQM08, Beijing (China), Oct. 06-10, 200

Instanton-Induced Interactions in Finite Density QCD

We consider the finite density, zero-temperature behaviour of quark matter in the instanton picture. Since the instanton-induced interactions are attractive in both $\bar{q}q$ and $qq$ channels, a competition ensues between phases of matter with condensation in either or both. It results in chiral symmetry restoration due to the onset of diquark condensation, a `colour superconductor', at finite density.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, uses espcrc1.sty. To appear in Proceedings of Quark Matter 99 (10-14 May 1999, Torino, Italy) and PANIC 99 (10-16 June 1999, Uppsala, Sweden