Formation of Dense Partonic Matter in High Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions: Highlights of RHIC Results

Abstract

I review some important results from RHIC experiments. They were obtained in a unique environment for studying QCD bulk matter at temperatures and densities that surpass the limits where hadrons can exist as individual entities, raising the quark-gluon degrees of freedom to prominence. These findings support the major experimental observations from measuring the bulk properties of particle production, particle ratios and chemical freeze-out conditions, elliptic flow followed by hard probes measurements: di-jet fragment azimuthal correlations, high-pt hadron suppression, and heavy-flavors probes. I present the measurements as a function of collision centrality, energy, system size and for different particle species. These results reveal that a dense strongly interacting medium was created in central Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV: the RHIC discovery. Further, they suggest that this medium is partonic. However, the discoveries so far observed at RHIC are far from being understood fully. Accordingly, the focus of the experiments has shifted from the discovery phase to the detailed exploration phase of the properties of this medium.