Date :	From 2015-05-11 To 2015-06-05
Advisory committee :	Jean-Paul Blaizot (Saclay),Frithjof Karsch (BNL and Bielefeld),Krishna Rajagopal (MIT),Dirk Rischke (Frankfurt), Raju Venugopalan (BNL),Jochen Wambach (GSI),Nu Xu (Berkeley & CCNU),Zhao-xi Zhang (ITP-CAS), Peng-fei Zhuang (Tsinghua),Bing-song Zou (ITP-CAS)
Local coordinators :	Rong-gen Cai (ITP),Heng-tong Ding (CCNU),Mei Huang (IHEP-CAS),Yu-xin Liu (Peking),Yu-gang Ma (SINAP-CAS),Qun Wang (USTC),Hong-shi Zong (Nangjing)
International coordinators :	Jiunn-Wei Chen (Taipei),Hong Liu (MIT),Jan M. Pawlowski (Heidelberg),Ralf Rapp (TAMU),Xin-nian Wang (Berkeley)

 

The proposed program is about physics of matter of strong interaction under extreme conditions in high temperature and density. This situation was realized in the very early stages of the universe evolution and exists in the inner core of cold neutron stars and pure quark stars. In the laboratory, extreme conditions of temperature and density are created in heavy-ion collisions at relativistic energies. Such experiments are performed at the world's largest and most powerful accelerator facilities: the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The ensuing "little bangs" aim at creating similar conditions as those during the quark-hadron transition in the early universe, trying to advance our understanding of primordial strong interaction matter created in the "big bang". The physical understanding of the dynamics of strong-interaction matter in the early universe, in astrophysical scenarios, or in heavy-ion collisions, requires detailed theoretical studies of its equilibrium and non-equilibrium properties. Central questions concern the phase diagram and the nature of possible phase transitions, the structure and fundamental degrees of freedom of the various phases, the pertinent transport properties and the thermalization time scale.