In this review, we present an up-to-date phenomenological summary of research developments in the physics of the Quark–Gluon Plasma (QGP). A short historical perspective and theoretical motivation for this rapidly developing field of contemporary particle physics is provided. In addition, we introduce and discuss the role of the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) ground state, non-perturbative and lattice QCD results on the QGP properties, as well as the transport models used to make a connection between theory and experiment. The experimental part presents the selected results on bulk observables, hard and penetrating probes obtained in the ultra-relativistic heavy-ion experiments carried out at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (BNL RHIC) and CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerators. We also give a brief overview of new developments related to the ongoing searches of the QCD critical point and to the collectivity in small (p + p and p + A) systems.

We propose to constrain the gluon Wigner distribution in the nucleon by studying the exclusive diffractive dijet production process in ultraperipheral proton-nucleus collisions (UPCs) at the RHIC and the LHC. Compared to the previous proposal in Ref. [Y. Hatta, B. W. Xiao, and F. Yuan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 202301 (2016).] to study the same observable in lepton-nucleon scattering, the use of UPCs has a few advantages: not only is the cross section larger, but the extraction of the Wigner distribution from the data also becomes simpler, including its elliptic angular dependence. We compute the corresponding cross section and evaluate the coefficients using models which include the gluon saturation effects. A potential for the measurements of the Wigner distribution at current and future experimental facilities is also discussed.

We study under which conditions a first-order phase transition in a composite dark sector can yield an observable stochastic gravitational-wave signal. To this end, we employ the Linear-Sigma model featuring N _f = 3, 4, 5 flavours and perform a Cornwall-Jackiw-Tomboulis computation also accounting for the effects of the Polyakov loop. The model allows us to investigate the chiral phase transition in regimes that can mimic QCD-like theories incorporating in addition composite dynamics associated with the effects of confinement-deconfinement phase transition. A further benefit of this approach is that it allows to study the limit in which the effective interactions are weak. We show that strong first-order phase transitions occur for weak effective couplings of the composite sector leading to gravitational-wave signals potentially detectable at future experimental facilities.

In this work, we revise the conventional description of [equation], [equation], [equation] and [equation]elastic photo- and electroproduction off a nucleon target within the color dipole picture and...