Speaker
Description
Collisions of heavy-ions at relativistic energies provide an essential tool to study the behavior of strongly interacting matter at elevated temperature and density.
In the regime of few GeV per nucleon, quark deconfinement does not occur, but a non-trivial dynamics of the system is driven by moderate temperatures (few tens MeV) and baryon densities (2-3 nuclear saturation density), which lead to abundant excitation of baryonic resonances.
Currently, understanding of such hot and dense medium is not yet full.
HADES (High-Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer) is a multi-purpose particle detector setup designed specifically to perform such studies. It has been used in experiments with heavy-ion collisions as well as in proton- and pion-induced reactions on a fixed target with beams in the energy range of a few GeV, received from the SIS18 accelerator located in Darmstadt, Germany.
In this contribution, we give an overview of HADES results from Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.42 GeV and Ag+Ag collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.55 and 2.42 GeV. The observables under investigation include electromagnetic probes, strangeness production, light flavor hadrons flow and fluctuations, as well as correlation observables.
We also give an outlook to the sensitivity to the phase structure of baryon-dominated matter with the new HADES program at further lowered beam energies.
