Strange matter

Resumo

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions (RHIC) are a promising tool for the investigation of two fascinating subjects of modern physics: the physics of both stange quarks and strange hadronic matter. It is the purpose of the present project to give continuity to our previous efforts of exploring possible signatures of strange matter in RHIC. To that extent, or recent consideration of a new equation of state including strange quarks and the non-trivial vacuum of QCD will be further explored and contact will be made with effective models of the nucleon. In particular, we intend to investigate possible extensions of the quark-meson coupling (QMC) model to deal with the hadron-to-quark phase transition in dense matter. Another direction of interest is the development renormalization group methods for the construction of QCD Coulomb-gauge based quark models for baryons. The exchange of ideas and expertise's with researchers at the IFT-UNESP will certainly prove to be fruitful. (AU)