Chemistry Department Seminar

There has been recent excitement about the growing consensus
that collisions of gold ions at RHIC produce a hot, dense, and short-lived state of matter best described as a near-perfect fluid.The PHOBOS experiment at RHIC has contributed to this physics picture by measurements of bulk properties of the produced matter.This involves estimations of the initial state entropy via particle multiplicities, with areful attention paid to the role of the nuclear geometry, as well as studies of the collective hydrodynamical behavior of the matter as it evolves. PHOBOS has
also observed interesting "scaling" behaviors, where certain
properities appear to be invariant over a wide range of beam energies and system sizes,when viewed in the proper reference frame.Potential implications of these scaling rules will be discussed, in the context of results from PHOBOS and the other RHIC experiments as well as several theoretical approaches.