Speaker
Prof.
William A. Zajc
(Columbia University, US)
Description
The strongly-coupled nature of the quark-gluon plasma was discovered nearly twenty years ago. Since that time, we have learned a great deal about the sQGP and its transport properties, but the question of how quarks and gluons, the microscopic degrees of freedom, produce the near-perfect liquid properties observed in the bulk remains open. The sPHENIX experiment, the first collider detector to be built in the U.S. in over two decades, is designed to investigate the sQGP with jets and heavy flavor probes to reveal these essential aspects of thermal QCD matter. I will present both the intended sPHENIX program, and the experiment's current status, with first beam expected at essentially the time of this workshop.
