Statistical Fluctuations as Probes of Dense Matter

The use of statistical fluctuations as probes of the microscopic dynamics of hot and dense hadronic matter is reviewed. Critical fluctuations near the critical point of QCD matter are predicted to enhance fluctuations in pionic observables. Chemical fluctuations, especially those of locally conserved quantum numbers, such as electric charge and baryon number, can probe the nature of the carriers of these quantum numbers in the dense medium.Comment: Talk given at Statistical QCD, Bielefeld (Germany), August 26-30, 200

The "Perfect" Fluid Quenches Jets Almost Perfectly

The QCD matter produced in nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has been found to have a very low shear viscosity, which is close to the lower bound allowed by unitarity. The matter has also been found to strongly suppress the emission of energetic hadrons. This phenomenon, called "jet quenching" is interpreted to be the result of a large energy loss by the precursor parton on its path through the dense matter, primarily due to gluon radiation. I discuss how the two phenomena are related. The RHIC data suggest, in some scenarios of jet quenching, that the quark-gluon plasma created in nuclear collisions is characterized by strong coupling, but still admits a quasi-particle description.Comment: Lecture given at the International School of Nuclear Physics in Erice, Sicil