The construction of RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) at BNL will be completed by the time these proceedings are out and it will start accelerating gold nuclei at 100 GeV/A. What is the purpose of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions? The reader may have dreams such as i) study of high density matter, ii) production of the quark-gluon plasma, iii) quasi-reproduction of the big bang, iv) ...

Hard probes created through large momentum transfers are used to study the properties of QCD matter created in heavy-ion collisions, by comparing the measurements to those in p+p collisions. Jets, and the "quenching" or suppression of jets in the medium created in heavy-ion collisions, are studied through various different observables. We present the most recent measurements from √ sNN = 200 Ge...

The construction of RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) at BNL will be completed by the time these proceedings are out and it will start accelerating gold nuclei at 100 GeV/A. What is the purpose of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions? The reader may have dreams such as i) study of high density matter, ii) production of the quark-gluon plasma, iii) quasi-reproduction of the big bang, iv) ...

The reach of collider energies in heavy-ion collisions has profoundly changed our understanding of QCD under extreme conditions. I review some these new developments and comment on the properties of the produced medium as extracted from experimental data, as well as the exciting new opportunities which will be open at the LHC. QCD is a theory with a very rich dynamical structure but difficult t...

We present the first measurement of reconstructed jets in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Utilizing the large coverage of the STAR Time Projection Chamber and Electromagnetic Calorimeter, we apply several modern jet reconstruction algorithms and background subtraction techniques and explore their systematic uncertainties in heavy ion events. The differential spectrum for inclusive jet ...

Due to their penetrating nature, dileptons are a valuable probe for the properties of the hot and/or dense medium created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Dilepton invariant-mass spectra provide direct access to the properties of the electromagnetic current-correlation function in strongly interacting matter. In this paper an overview is given of our current theoretical understanding of th...

One motivation for studying the production of charmonium in high energy collisions is that these particles are among the simplest probes for heavy-ion collisions. In recent years, there have been significant developments in heavy quarkonium production, both in theory and in experiment. These developments may have important implications for the use of charmonium as a probe in heavy-ion collision...

I present a brief review of the existing models for particle multiplicity evaluation in heavy ion collisions which are at our disposal in the form of Monte Carlo simulators. Models are classified according to the physical mechanisms with which they try to describe the different stages of a high-energy collision between heavy nuclei. A comparison of predictions, as available at the beginning of ...

Jets can be used to probe the physical properties of the high energy density matter created in collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Measurements of strong suppression of inclusive hadron distributions and di-hadron correlations at high pT have already provided evidence for partonic energy loss. However, these measurements suffer from well-known geometric biases due to the c...

In relativistic heavy ion collisions J/ψ suppression has been recognized as an important tool to identify the possible phase transition to quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Matsui and Satz [1] predicted that in presence of quark-gluon plasma, binding of a cc̄ pair into a J/ψ meson will be hindered, leading to the so called J/ψ suppression in heavy ion collisions. Over the years several experiments measu...