A study of collective behavior in heavy ion collisions provides one of the most sensitive and promising probes for investigation of possible formation of new extreme state of strong interacting matter and elucidating its properties. Systematic of experimental results for final state azimuthal anisotropy is presented for heavy ion interactions at RHIC. Experimental data for azimuthal anisotropy ...

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) studies nuclear matter under a variety of conditions. Cold nuclear matter is probed with deuteron-gold collisions, while hot nuclear matter (possibly a quark-gluon plasma (QGP)) is created in heavy-ion collisions. The distribution of spin in polarized nucleons is measured with polarized proton collisions, and photoproduction is studied using the photon...

In central collisions at relativistic heavy ion colliders like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC/Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider LHC (in its heavy ion mode) at CERN/Geneva, one aims at detecting a new form of hadronic matter — the Quark Gluon Plasma. We discuss here a complementary aspect of these collisions, the very peripheral ones. Due to coherence, there are strong electroma...

Hadron production at high-pT displays a strong suppression pattern in a wide rapidity region in heavy ion collisions at RHIC energies. This finding indicates the presence of strong final state effects for both transversally and longitudinally traveling partons, namely induced energy loss. We have developed a perturbative QCD based model to describe hadron production in pp collision, which can b...

In central collisions at relativistic heavy ion colliders like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC/Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider LHC (in its heavy ion mode) at CERN/Geneva, one aims at detecting a new form of hadronic matter — the Quark Gluon Plasma. We discuss here a complementary aspect of these collisions, the very peripheral ones. Due to coherence, there are strong electroma...

The heavy ion physics approach to global event characterization has led us to instrument the forward region in the PHENIX experiment at RHIC. In heavy ion collisions this coverage yields a measurement of the “spectator” energy and its distribution about the beam direction. This energy flow is the basis of event-by-event determination of the centrality and reaction plane which are key to analyzi...

Recently, it has been demonstrated that the chemical composition of jets in heavy ion collisions is significantly altered compared to the jets in the vacuum. This signal can be used to probe the medium formed in nuclear collisions. In this study we investigate the possibility that fast light quarks and gluons can convert to heavy quarks when passing through a quark-gluon plasma. We study the ra...

Many of the hadron-hadron cross sections required for the study of the dynamics of matter produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions can be calculated using the quark-interchange model. Here we evaluate the low-energy dissociation cross sections of J/ψ, ψ′, χ, Υ, and Υ′ in collision with π, ρ, and K, which are important for the interpretation of heavy-quarkonium suppression as a signature fo...

We discuss the status of calculating in-medium modifications of vector-meson spectral functions in hot and dense matter, their application to dilepton spectra in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, and possible relations to chiral symmetry restoration. We emphasize the importance of constraining in-medium spectral functions by empirical information from scattering data, QCD sum rules, and l...