Colloquium di Dottorato: Vincenzo Greco

The ordinary nuclear matter at high temperature (T> 10¹²K) should undergo a transition to a plasma of quark and gluons, as now predicted by Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD) at finite temperature. This state of matter that have permeated the first microseconds of the Early Universe can be created for transient of time (10^-22s) in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collision at RHIC and LHC colliders.

I will overview some basic scales and degrees of freedom of this research area and review some main aspects of this research area emphasizing how over the years it has become possible to “see” inside the created matter probing its substructures at finer and finer scale. In the second part, I will focus the dynamics of the heavy quark in the QGP showing how the first results has shown a strong non-perturbative interaction inducing transport properties in agreement with the expectation from lattice QCD. I will conclude discussing the emerging studies on the impact of the huge initial electromagnetic fields (10¹⁸ Gauss) on their dynamics.