Abstract:
Ideal hydroynamics provides an excellent description of all aspects of the single-particle spectra of all hadrons with transverse momenta below about 1.5-2 GeV/c at RHIC. This is shown to require rapid local thermalization at a time scale below 1 fm/c and at energy densities which exceed the critical value for color deconfinement by an order of magnitude. The only known thermalized state at such energy densities is the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The rapid thermalization indicates that the QGP is a strongly interacting liquid rather than the weakly interacting gas of quarks and gluons that was previously expected.
  • 25.75.Nq
  • 12.38.Mh
  • quark-gluon plasma
  • hadrons
  • spectra
  • quark-gluon interactions
  • scattering: heavy ion
  • gold
  • charged particle: hadroproduction
  • transverse momentum: spectrum
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