My interests focus on relativistic heavy-ion collisions and physics of the quark-gluon plasma. Shortly after the Big Bang, hot and dense matter susceptible to the strong interaction, which is described by the Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD), was in a state called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) where quarks and gluons are deconfined from hadron’s interiors. Due to the rapid expansion of the Universe, the plasma went through a phase transition to form hadrons, in particular nucleons which constitute the building blocks of ordinary stable matter. The investigation of QGP properties yields novel insights into the development of the early Universe and the behavior of QCD under extreme conditions. Relativistic heavy-ion collisions offer a unique possibility to study the hot and dense QCD matter in terrestrial experiments and to probe properties of the statistical QCD. A transient state of deconfined quarks and gluons is expected to occur at the early stage of nucleus-nucleus collisions. Currently, there are experiments at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN, at Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. My research mostly concerns a theoretical description of relativistic heavy-ion collisions and quark-gluon plasma, in particular of the plasma beyond thermodynamical equilibrium. |