Hadronization and Chirality in Strongly Interacting Partonic Matter — The Future of the RHIC Program

Abstract

New physics and detector concepts for a future pp and heavy ion program at the RHIC-II accelerator facility will be discussed. I will focus on hadronic observables which enable us to gain a better understanding on the hadronization from a sQGP and the chiral symmetry restoration in a sQGP. The ultimate question of how matter acquires mass can be addressed by this program in a complementary way to the Higgs search in high energy physics. The contributions of the RHIC program to the study of QCD will be discussed in detail.