Che-Ming Ko
Wigner functions in heavy-ion Collisions
Among the many transformative contributions by Eugene Wigner to physics is the Wigner phase-space distribution function, which he introduced in 1932. Besides its extensive applications in quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum optics and information, and quantum chemistry etc., Wigner functions have also found applications in heavy ion collisions studied at the Heavy Ion Synchrotron at GSI, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. These applications have helped understand the dynamics of heavy ion collisions and the mechanism of particle production from created hot dense matter. As a result, significant advances have been achieved in the determination of the properties of dense nuclear matter relevant for understanding the properties of neutron stars and their mergers, the properties of the quark-gluon plasma that existed soon after the big bang, and the dynamics of little bang nucleosynthesis. A brief review of these applications will be presented in this talk.
