Users' e-Log
Short news items of interest to the RHIC/AGS community. This week: the Quark Matter conference, HPSS, and P5.
Quark Matter 2008
Many of the transparencies from the Quark Matter conference can be found here. The next issue of RHIC News will have news from the RHIC experiments presented at the conference.
Former UEC Chair John Hill of Iowa State University and his wife, Fay, are seen here holding the Taj Mahal.
Awards for RHIC Physicists at Quark Matter
At the recent Quark Matter Conference, physicists working at RHIC swept the Nuclear Physics A - Young Scientist Awards for oral presentations. Andre Mischke (above, right) of the STAR collaboration was recognized for his paper "Heavy flavor particle correlations in STAR via electron azimuthal correlations with open charm mesons" and Torsten Dahms (above, left) of the PHENIX collaboration for his paper, "Measurements of thermal photons in heavy ion collisions with PHENIX."
RHIC Cryogenic Improvements
Improvements in the RHIC cryogenic system have resulted in considerable cost savings. Details can be found here.
Stochastic Cooling at RHIC
Simon van der Meer of CERN shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of stochastic cooling, which made it possible to accumulate and store antiprotons in the SPS at CERN, leading to the discovery of the W and Z bosons. His Nobel lecture can be found here. Stochastic cooling is in the news at RHIC here and was explained in an earlier edition of RHIC News here.
Conan O'Brien Studies Spin
With the help of MIT professor Peter Fisher, late night talk show host Conan O'Brien explored some of the physics of spin: Part 1 and Part 2.
The Petabyte Club
The High Performance Storage System, or HPSS, is software used to manage data on disk and tape, and was developed in a collaboration between IBM and five DOE laboratories, among others. Learn more about it here and see that Brookhaven is now ranked fourth in the "Petabyte Club," with 6.5 Petabytes of data and 36 million files. An average desktop computer has a 100 Gbyte disk--6.5 Petabytes is the capacity of 65,000 of them.
P5
The Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, constituted by HEPAP to create a long range plan for high energy physics in the US will be meeting at Brookhaven March 6-7, 2008. The agenda and transparencies from past meetings at Fermilab and SLAC are here.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National
Laboratory is a world-class scientific research facility primarily
funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Hundreds
of physicists from around the world use RHIC to study what the
universe may have looked like in the first few moments after its
creation. What physicists learn from these collisions may help us
understand more about why the physical world works the way it does,
from the smallest subatomic particles, to the largest stars.