Phase diagram of strongly interacting matter: From Lattice QCD to Heavy-Ion Collision Experiments

The QCD phase diagram exhibits a broad variety of fascinating structures. Depending on the temperature and baryochemical potential, strongly interacting matter can be present in the form of a hadronic gas, of a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons, or of further possible states of matter which have yet to be discovered and understood from first principles. The energy scales involved in the transitions between the different phases are in the non-perturbative regime of QCD and it is therefore necessary to solve a strongly coupled non-perturbative quantum gauge theory, which is a difficult theoretical challenge. Experimentally, these states of matter can be explored in heavy-ion collision experiments, currently operating at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL, Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and two facilities planned to come online in the near future, Facility for Antiproton and Ion on Research (FAIR) at GSI and Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility (NICA) at JINR. The purpose of this workshop is to bridge the gap between thermodynamic equilibrium calculations of QCD and the ample experimental data, bringing together experts from theory, experiment and phenomenology in order to work together on identifying viable approaches to connect ab initio calculations to phenomenology and experiment.