Dr. Azwinndini Muronga (University of Minnesota)
At temperatures of about 2x1012 K (far hotter than the center
of the sun), nuclear matter is predicted to go through a phase transition
and melt into a plasma of quarks and gluons, a state of matter that only
existed briefly a few microseconds after the Big Bang in our early universe.
Heavy nuclei are accelerated to extreme high energies and collide with
each other at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to produce such
a new form of matter in a laboratory. Many tools and methodologies have
been developed to probe the properties of the hot and dense matter formed
in heavy ion experiments. The use of fluid dynamics as one of the methods
to study the dynamics of a
hot and dense nuclear matter will be discussed. The recent developments
in fluid dynamic theory beyond Navier-Stokes-Fourier laws and in extended
irreversible thermodynamics will be highlighted.