Introductory Overview of Quark Matter 2012

Understand

The two arguably most generic phenomena seen in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions are the flow of essentially all soft hadronic observables and the quenching of essentially all hard hadronic observables.

• Limiting the discussion to these two classes of phenomena, I review what can be said so far about the properties of hot and dense QCD matter from the heavy ion programs at RHIC and at the LHC, and I discuss the opportunities for further progress in the coming years.