Download or read book Characterizing the Non-equilibrium Quark-gluon Plasma with Photons and Hadrons written by Jean-François Paquet and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Heavy ion collisions can be used to study the properties of nuclear matter in extreme conditions. These events concentrate enough energy in a small volume to melt the colliding nuclei into a plasma of quarks and gluons. This plasma appears to achieve near local thermal equilibrium during its very short lifetime, allowing for its long scale properties to be investigated with hydrodynamics. In this thesis, the production of hadrons and photons in heavy ion collisions is studied using a sophisticated hydrodynamical model that includes realistic initial conditions, hydrodynamical equations with both shear and bulk viscosities, along with an appropriate treatment of final state hadronic rescatterings. A wide range of hadronic observables, measured at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), are shown to be described well by this model, and bulk viscosity is found to be essential to this level of agreement with data. Building on this successful model, direct photon production in heavy ion collisions is studied. The effect on photon emission of the emitting medium's viscosity is investigated, and the method for evaluating direct photon momentum anisotropies for comparisons with experimental measurements is clarified. Both the direct photon spectrum and momentum anisotropy are shown to be within or slightly below the uncertainties of available experimental measurements." --