Experimental Studies of Quark Gluon Plasma at RHIC

Abstract

A new state of matter, Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) is supposed to exist under extreme temperature and/or density conditions just as a beginning of this early universe after the Big Bang. High energy nucleus‐nucleus collisions at the Relativistic Heavy‐Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has been used to form the QGP and to study the properties of QGP. The recent progress on the experimental research of QGP at RHIC experiments and the understanding of the properties are discussed. Major discoveries at RHIC experiments are very strong energy loss of high energy partons in central Au+Au collisions and very large elliptic and collective expansion given by the initial almond geometry in non‐central Au+Au collisions. Those two finding and related physics explanations as well as future plans are presented.