Equilibrium in Heavy Ion Collisions

We discuss the question of equilibriation in heavy ion collisions and how it can be addressed in experimentComment: Proceedings 19th Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, Breckenridge, Co, 200

Deciphering Deconfinement in Correlations of Conserved Charges

Diagonal and off-diagonal flavor and conserved charge susceptibilities reveal the prevalent degrees of freedom of heated strongly interacting matter. Results obtained from lattice simulations are compared with various model estimates in an effort to weed down various possible pictures of a quark gluon plasma. We argue that the vanishing of the off-diagonal quark flavor susceptibilities and its derivatives with respect to chemical potential, at temperatures above 1.5Tc, can only be understood in a picture of a gas or liquid composed of quasi-particles which carry the same quantum numbers as quarks and antiquarks. A potential new observable, blind to neutral and non-strange particles, is introduced and related via isospin symmetry to the ratio of susceptibilities of baryonic strangeness to strangeness generated in the excited matter created at RHIC.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, LATEX, To appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter, Los Angeles, CA, Mar 26-31, 200

Baryon number and strangeness: signals of a deconfined antecedent

The correlation between baryon number and strangeness is used to discern the nature of the deconfined matter produced at vanishing chemical potential in high-energy nuclear collisions at the BNL RHIC. Comparisons of results of various phenomenological models with correlations extracted from lattice QCD calculations suggest that a quasi-particle picture applies. At finite baryon densities, such as those encountered at the CERN SPS, it is demonstrated that the presence of a first-order phase transition and the accompanying development of spinodal decomposition would significantly enhance the number of strangeness carriers and the associated fluctuations.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, latex, to appear in the proceedings of the Workshop on Correlations and Fluctuations in Relativistic Nuclear collisions, (MIT, April 21-23,2005

Baryon-strangeness correlations: a diagnostic of strongly interacting matter

The correlation between baryon number and strangeness elucidates the nature of strongly interacting matter, such as that formed transiently in high-energy nuclear collisions. This diagnostic can be extracted theoretically from lattice QCD calculations and experimentally from event-by-event fluctuations. The analysis of present lattice results above the critical temperature severely limits the presence of q-qbar bound states, thus supporting a picture of independent (quasi)quarks.Comment: 4 pages, 2 eps figures, Revised: several sign typos have been fixed (the PRL version is correct

Dihadron fragmentation functions and high Pt hadron-hadron correlations

We propose the formulation of a dihadron fragmentation function in terms of parton matrix elements. Under the collinear factorization approximation and facilitated by the cut-vertex technique, the two hadron inclusive cross section at leading order (LO) in e+ e- annihilation is shown to factorize into a short distance parton cross section and the long distance dihadron fragmentation function. We also derive the DGLAP evolution equation of this function at leading log. The evolution equation for the non-singlet quark fragmentation function is solved numerically with a simple ansatz for the initial condition and results are presented for cases of physical interest.Comment: Latex, 4 pages, 4 figures, talk given at Quark Matter 2004, To appear in J. Phys.

A pQCD-based description of heavy and light flavor jet quenching

We present a successful description of the medium modification of light and heavy flavor jets within a perturbative QCD (pQCD) based approach. Only the couplings involving hard partons are assumed to be weak. The effect of the medium on a hard parton, per unit time, is encoded in terms of three non-perturbative, related transport coefficients which describe the transverse momentum squared gained, the elastic energy loss and diffusion in elastic energy transfer. A fit of the centrality dependence of the suppression and the azimuthal anisotropy of leading hadrons tends to favor somewhat larger transport coefficients for heavy quarks. Imposing additional constraints based on leading order (LO) Hard Thermal Loop (HTL) effective theory, leads to a worsening of the fit.Comment: v2, 4 pages, 3 figure