PHY552, NUCLEAR PHYSICS II, Fall 2009 Prof.Edward Shuryak
(office C139, phone 632-8127)

Home page: http://dau2.physics.sunysb.edu/~shuryak/NPII_09/NPII_09_home.html

11:20-12:40 TuTh, C133 (``G.Brown room")

THE MAIN OBJECTIVE is to introduce graduate students, both THEORISTS and EXPERIMENTALISTS, to nuclear/hadronic physics and non-perturbative QCD. We will discuss Quark-Gluon Plasma and other phases of QCD, and their manifestations in heavy ion collisions (at RHIC and alsewhere), the structure of the QCD vacuum, and elements of hadronic spectroscopy.
PRE-REQUISITES: Grad. or undergrad general course on Particle/Nuclear physics required; Nucl.Phys.I and Statistical Mechanics desirable. No textbooks exist which fits it: reading will be provided as handouts, together with the lecture notes.

QCD generalities and the QCD phase diagram

The QCD vacuum: the non-perturbative scales, main puzzles of hadronic spectroscopy

Topology and semiclassical tunneling in gauge theories, the instantons, their zero modes, dyons

Chiral symmetry breaking, NJL model and instantons

Field theory at finite temperature and density lattice gauge theory

Perturbative (weakly coupled) QGP

Heavy ion collisions: the space-time picture, freezeouts

Flows and relativistic hydrodynamics, viscosity

Jet quenching, correlations, conical flow

Strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (and other strongly coupled systems -- pasmas, traped atoms)

Magnetic monopoles in gauge theories: e/m duality

``Dual superconductor" picture of confinement, ``Magnetic plasma" in the near-Tc region

Strong coupling regime and the AdS/CFT correspondence

color superconductivity and other finite-density phases

The grade will be be based on quality of the presentation which students are supposed to make at the end of the semester, based on a research paper from a supplied list.