Relativistic Nuclear Collisions: Towards a Consistent Tomography of Matter Under Extreme Conditions

Prof. Charles Gale, McGill University
3:30 PM, Apr. 22, 2008, Duke Faculty Lounge

I discuss recent calculations of the production of photons (both hard and soft) from relativistic nuclear collisions. These electromagnetic probes are treated consistently with other hard probes of heavy ion collisions. In particular, we show that the phenomenology of QCD jets can be made consistent with all that is measured in photon observables at RHIC, provided a realistic space-time modeling of the nuclear reaction is invoked.