Abstract:
A recent major component of the RHIC physics program is a beam energy scan (BES), in which the collision energy is varied over more than an order of magnitude, from 7 to 200 GeV. Systems created at these energies are expected to probe non-trivial structures in the QCD phase diagram,and straddle SPS energies in which "special" behaviour has been claimed in bulk measurements.
I will focus on the femtoscopic components of the STAR-BES program, in particular (i) the second-order azimuthal anisotropy of pion HBT radii; (ii) geometric substructure as probed by pion-kaon correlations; (iii) light nuclei and hypernuclei formation.
A major focus of the talk will be on the parallels between relativistic heavy ion physics and the physics of "micro-explosions." The study of the latter is a major program in femtosecond laser physics, with relevance to nuclear fusion studies and ultradense planetary cores. The parallels between these two fields has heretofore been unrecognized by participants in either.