Heavy Ion Collisions: Achievements and Challenges

Abstract

A decade ago brief summary of the field could be formulated as a discovery of strongly-coupled Quark-Gluon-Plasma, sQGP, making a very good liquid with surprisingly small viscosity. Since 2010 we have LHC program, which added a lot to our understanding, and now there seems to be a need to consolidate what we learned and formulate a list of issues to be studied next. Hydrodynamical perturbations, leading to higher harmonics of angular correlations, are identified as long-lived sound waves. Recently studied reactions involving sounds include phonon decays into two ("loop viscosity"), phonon+magnetic field into photons/dileptons (sono-magneto-luminescence), and two phonons into a gravity wave, a penetrating probe of the Big Bang. The mainstream issues in the field now include a quest to study transition between $pp,pA$ and heavy ion $AA$ collisions, with an aim to locate "the smallest drops" of the sQGP displaying collective/hydrodynamics behavior. The issues related to out-of-equilibrium stage of the collisions, and mechanisms of the equilibration, in weak and strong coupling, are also hotly debated.