Strongly Interacting Matter Under Rotation: An Introduction

Understand

Ultrarelativistic collisions between heavy nuclei briefly generate the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a new state of matter characterized by deconfined partons last seen microseconds after the Big Bang.

• The properties of the QGP are of intense interest, and a large community has developed over several decades, to produce, measure and understand this primordial plasma.
• The plasma is now recognized to be a strongly-coupled fluid with remarkable properties, and hydrodynamics is commonly used to quantify and model the system.
• An important feature of any fluid is its vorticity, related to the local angular momentum density; however, this degree of freedom has received relatively little attention because no experimental signals of vorticity had been detected.