Wigner Functions in High Energy Physics

Recent developments are (meta)reviewed in the applications of Wigner functions to describe the observed single particle spectra and two-particle Bose-Einstein (or Hanbury Brown -- Twiss) correlations in high energy particle and nuclear physics, with examples from hadron-proton and Pb + Pb collisions at CERN SPS.Comment: 4 pages, invited talk at the Wigner Centennial Conference, Pecs, Hungary, July 200

Quark-Gluon Plasma Freeze-out from a Supercooled State?

We consider time-scales of first-order deconfinement or chiral-symmetry restoring phase transition in high energy heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. Recently it was shown that the system must supercool below $T_c$ before the nucleation of hadronic bubbles is sufficiently rapid to overcome the expansion rate. It is shown here that the expected time-scales of high energy heavy ion reactions are sufficiently short to prevent the reheating of the system to near $T_c$. If quark-gluon plasma is produced in these collisions, it may have to hadronize from a supercooled state and the hadrons produced during rehadronization may freeze-out almost immediately.Comment: LaTeX, 14 pages + 2 eps figures. Contribution to the Proceedings of the Workshop on Preequilibrium Parton Dynamics, LBL, Aug. 199

Modelling correlations in heavy ion collisions

Modelling correlations in heavy ion collisions is reviewed from model independent characterization of the two-particle correlations to Buda-Lund hydro model fits to correlations and spectra in Au + Au collisions at sqrt{s}=130 AGeV at RHIC.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, talk given at XXXI International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics, Sept 1-7, 2001, Datong China. See http://202.114.35.18