Duke University

Going with the Flow: What the data from RHIC have taught us so far

Abstract: The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was constructed to explore the properties of matter at the highest energies, where theorists expected hadronic matter to transform into a quark-gluon plasma. In my talk I will discuss, from a theorist's perspective, what the data from 5 years of RHIC running have taught us about the properties of strongly interacting matter at energy densities far above nuclear matter density. I will survey the salient experimental phenomena and their interpretation, and discuss the most challenging theoretical problems posed by the results from RHIC.

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