sPHENIX is a new detector at RHIC.

[Christine Nattrass <saccharomyces.cerevisae AT gmail.com>]

Dear all
I would like to draw your attention to a couple of heavy ion sessions at the April meeting.  We have an invited session, “ The hadronic spectrum in hot and cold QCD” and a mini-symposium on “Correlations and fluctuations in heavy ion collisions”.  Brief descriptions of these sessions are below. The abstract submission deadline is Jan. 10. I hope we’ll get a lot of contributions from sPHENIX!  In particular it’s a great way for students to get exposure and participation in APS meetings is important for the standing of heavy ion physics in the broader US nuclear physics community.
Thanks Christine

The hadronic spectrum in hot and cold QCD Invited session In this session we will review our current understanding of the hadronic spectrum in vacuum and in hot QCD media.  In media, recent lattice QCD measurements of fluctuations of conserved charges in the crossover region has led to new insights into how the hadron spectrum develops during the transition, and the role of chiral symmetry breaking. The hadron gas model plays an important role in interpreting measurements of fluctuations and particle yields in heavy ion collisions. At zero temperature, the hadronic spectrum has also been studied in increasing detail by lattice QCD, and these calculations assist in interpreting spectroscopic experiments such as GlueX. The current session will emphasize the overlap between these two efforts.   Invited speakers: Claudia Ratti, Jozef Dudek, Anders Knospe
Correlations and fluctuations in heavy ion collisions Mini-symposium Correlations and fluctuations provide critical insight into the formation and evolution of the QGP, the initial state, hadronization mechanisms, and the nature of the QCD phase transition.  To this end, this session will discuss measurements and theoretical predictions of anisotropic flow, with an emphasis on recent results on longitudinal fluctuations and charge dependent correlation functions (such as balance functions).  These results are essential to interpreting measurements of the Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME), vorticity and polarization, moments of net particle distributions, and other related observables.
Invited speaker: Anthony Timmins