Yale University

Title: Recreating the Primordial Quark-Gluon Soup

Abstract: In collisions of ultra-relativistic heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), nuclear matter reaches energy densities expected only within the first microseconds after the Big Bang and possibly in the cores of dense stars. At such large energy densities nuclear matter is predicted to "melt" and form a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons. The long-term goals of the present experiments at RHIC and of future heavy ion experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are to create and study hot dense matter, to uniquely identify the quark-gluon plasma, and to study its properties. I will present a brief introduction to the field, and a summary and interpretation of the recent physics results. I will then focus on exciting new evidence for the suppression of fast particles traversing the matter, in an attempt to elucidate properties of the dense matter formed in these collisions.