Wigner Colloquia / Wigner kollokvium

Boiling Quarks, Melting Hadrons

by Prof. Johann Rafelski (University of Arizona)

Europe/Budapest
Bldg. 1, conference room (KFKI campus Budapest)

Bldg. 1, conference room

KFKI campus Budapest

Budapest, Konkoly-Thege Miklós u 29-33
Description

This year we celebrate 50 years of Hagedorn temperature, the pivotal idea that opened to study high energy density matter defining our Universe in primordial times. Today we are able to connect the present day visible Universe with prior invisible eras, leading on to the primordial period above Hagedorn temperature before the emergence of matter as we know it. This was the quark-gluon plasma time defined in recent experimental laboratory work at CERN including LHC, and at BNL-RHIC. We understand and can track the energy content of the Universe in time: the figure shows how the energy composition evolved across eons since the beginning of quark plasma. Time permitting I will introduce topics such as the matter forming hadronization process, neutrino free-streaming, reheating and darkness, Higgs vacuum instability, dark energy as vacuum energy, constraints on dark matter free-streaming.