CERN THEORY INSTITUTE

At the end of the first year of operation, the LHC will collide for the first time lead ions at the TeV scale. Many of the long-debated characteristics of heavy ion collisions will become experimentally accessible in this first exploratory low luminosity run. In particular, early experimental results are expected on the topics of event multiplicity and multiplicity distributions, elliptic flow, and early measurements of the nuclear modification factor. These measurements address some of the main discoveries of the RHIC heavy ion programme at a 30-times higher center of mass energy, and they will provide first long-awaited constraints on the collective dynamics of heavy ion collisions at the TeV-scale.
The proposed CERN TH Institute aims at an in-depth discussion of the theoretical basis and phenomenological modeling of heavy ion collisions at the TeV-scale with particular emphasis on those measurements, which will be feasible in the first year of heavy ion running. In particular, we plan to set aside one focus week for the discussion of all aspects of a viscous fluid dynamic description of heavy ion collisions, which will be tested in year-1 elliptic flow measurements. This focus week will include overviews of our understanding of transport coefficients, reviewing various strong coupling approaches, and addressing the question why viscosity and diffusion constant can be very small. It will also cover hydrodynamic simulations and an in-depth discussion of experimental tests ranging from elliptic flow to Mach-cone like particle correlations, and their potential for constraining QCD transport coefficients. In further spotlight discussions, we shall aim at a critical assessment of models of multi- particle production, and at a debate of those aspects of models of parton energy loss, which will be testable in the early LHC running. We also plan to discuss to what extent first data from p-p collisions at the LHC provide constraints for the heavy ion programme, or whether high-multiplicity p-p events show even some of the pertinent features of heavy ion collisions.

The TH Institute will take place at CERN, Aug 16 - Sep 10, 2010.

We plan to organize the schedule of the TH Institute mainly around the topics mentioned above. Most generally, however, the TH Institute will be a forum for the dis-cussion of novel and even unconventional ideas related to the theory and phenome-nology of early heavy ion collisions at the LHC.

Please apply at the Institute Main Page .