BGU Physics Department

Colloquium, May 17th, 2012


The sounds of the Big and the Little Bangs


Edward Shuryak, Stony Brook University
The talk is about the recent discovery of the sound propagating across the fireball created in Heavy Ion collisions (the Little Bang). Its basic physics is about the same as that in the Big Bang, seen as perturbations of the Cosmic Microwave background. The theory is described and compared with correlation functions recently measured at RHIC and LHC. While the initial state perturbations are caused by fluctuation in the nucleon interactions, another source of sounds are jets. We end up describing the emerging theory and phenomenology of jet-related soundsand shocks.