The findings of RHIC about quark gluon plasma from the TGD point of view

The study of quark gluon pasma (QGP) at RHIC has revealed many surprises.

1. Jet quenching means that jets predicted by QCD lose energy much faster than expected. This would be due to the strong interactions with quark gluon plasma implying dissipation. In QCD, this interaction is modelled in terms of collisions of quarks with the quark gluon plasma formed by quarks and gluons.
2. The almost ideal perfect fluid behavior was totally unexpected. This hydrodynamic flow is known as elliptic flow. A further surprise was that heavy quarks also participate in the elliptic flow. This is like boulders flowing in a river.
3. Also light ions create the quark-gluon plasma. QGP, or whatever it is, is created even in the collisions of photons and heavy ions.
4. The basic questions concern the critical temperature and critical collision energy per nucleon at which the transition to QGP occurs. There is no consensus but the proposal is that 19.6 GeV collision energy could be a critical point. There is however a bumpy structure also below this critical point.

What can be said about these findings in the TGD framework?

1. The counterpart of quenching would be conformal dissipation or equivalently p-adic occurring for mass squared scale identifiable as conformal weight rather than energy. p-Adic temperature T_p which depends logarithmically on the p-adic mass scale has a discrete spectrum and would decrease in a stepwise manner in the p-adic cooling. T_p is naturally identifiable as the temperature of the counterpart of QGP and has also an interpretation as Hagedorn temperature.
2. p-Adic length scales hypothesis suggests that there is an entire discrete hierarchy of critical temperatures rather than only a single critical temperature. These temperatures would come as logarithms of p-adic mass squared scales proportional to 2^k.
3. In the TGD framework, the large values of h_eff associated with the quantum criticality and implying long scale quantum coherence could explain the perfect liquid behavior in terms of long term correlations, which are typical for hydrodynamics. Recall that at the classical level TGD is essentially a hydrodynamical theory since field equations reduce to conservation laws for the charges associated with the isometries of H.
4. The TGD based explanation for the boulders flowing in the river would be that for the TGD analog of QGP, the induced Dirac equation in X⁴ implies that both leptons and quarks behave like massless particles. Masses emerge only in the hadronic initial and final states constructed as modes of the H Dirac equation.

See the article The findings of RHIC about quark gluon plasma from the TGD point of view.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.