Speaker
Frank Geurts
(Rice University)
Description
Dilepton measurements play an essential role in the study of hot and dense nuclear matter. Compared to hadrons, leptons have only little interaction with the strongly interacting system. Thus, dileptons provide ideal penetrating probes that allow the study of such a system throughout its space-time evolution. Depending on the dominating contributions in certain invariant mass ranges, these studies include the effects of chiral symmetry restoration, thermal radiation from the quark-gluon plasma, to effects of the medium on the heavy quarks that are created in the primordial processes. Systematic measurements of quarkonium production and elliptic flow may help understand its production mechanism and interactions with nuclear matter.
I will review dilepton and charmonium measurements performed over a range of beam energies by the STAR experiment as well discuss the prospects of recently installed upgrades and future plans.
Primary author
Frank Geurts
(Rice University)
