prof. dr Marlene Nahrgang, IMT Atlantique, Nantes

Super hot and extremely dense - is there a critical point for the strong interaction?

Performing heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies gives us access to new states of matter, like the quark-gluon plasma. When the hot and dense fireball created in these experiments expands and cools, the system undergoes a phase transition to hadronic degrees of freedom, which are measured in the detectors. A central question of research in this field is whether a critical point for strongly interacting matter exists. In this talk, I will review the current status of and future directions in the search for this critical point.