Observing a small fluid and its fluctuations at the LHC

by Prof. Jean-Yves Ollitrault (IPhT Saclay, France)

Tuesday 20 Nov 2012, 16:00 → 17:00 Asia/Kolkata

AG69 (Colaba Campus)

Nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) create a drop of quark-gluon plasma which expands into the vacuum like a fluid. In this talk, I will review experimental observables that can be used to probe this collective behavior. I will show that quantum fluctuations in the wavefunctions of incoming nuclei, followed by collective flow, are likely to explain the structure of correlations, which has been recently measured in unprecedented detail.