Colloquia

Heavy-ion collisions can produce nuclear material over a range of densities and proton fractions to study the nuclear equation-of-state. These measurements are enabled by accelerating nuclei to – in some cases – GeV energies and detecting the fragments that are produced from the collisions.  The detectors are multi-detector arrays capable of measuring dozens of particles simultaneously from a single collision.  Data rates can range up to many hundreds of collisions per second. One can either explore the characteristics of the individual fragments that are produced, often extracting particle ratios or double ratios, or correlations between the fragments – in particular transverse collective flow.  From very low density to about three times normal nuclear density measurements have been made of the density dependence of the asymmetry energy.  I will present an overview of how these measurements have been made and the constraints they have set on the nuclear equation-of-state.