Welcome to RHIC News
We hope that this web publication will in some small measure reflect the excitement of the RHIC and AGS program at Brookhaven, as explained by some of the people who are doing the experiments, analyzing the data, and writing the papers.
Quark
Matter 2008
By Ajit Mohanty
The Quark Matter 2008 conference was held from 4-10 February
2008 at Birla auditorium and convention centre in Jaipur which
is about 260 km away from Delhi. The pink city Jaipur is a
famous tourist place known for forts, palaces, architectural
marvels and tales of valor. It was the twentieth in the series
of international conferences on ultra relativistic
nucleus-nucleus collisions and was attended by over 400
scientists from all over the world. More...
Highlights
From PHENIX I
By Achim Franz
More than 20 years ago, at Quark Matter 1987 in Nordkirchen,
Germany, the first data from the CERN SPS heavy ion program were
presented [1]. At that time the emphasis was on global
observables like overall multiplicity, transverse energy flow,
or even collision size and shape via HBT interferometry. More...
Highlights
from PHENIX II: Photons and Leptons
By Terry Awes
The PHENIX
experiment at RHIC was designed with emphasis on the measurement
of leptons and photons. Photons and leptons are of special
interest because they are penetrating probes that do not undergo
strong interactions and therefore are unlikely to interact with
the dense matter produced in heavy-ion collisions. Thus, they
carry information about the system at the time of their
production, throughout the entire evolution of the collision.
More...
STAR
QM08 Highlights I: Characterizing the new state of matter
discovered at RHIC
By Tim Hallman, STAR
Collaboration
The discovery phase at RHIC has yielded
overwhelming evidence for the creation of a new state of matter
in central heavy ion collisions — the hottest and densest yet
examined in the laboratory. It is highly opaque to colored
probes such as quarks and gluons, but not to photons. Elliptic
flow measurements suggest the matter behaves as a relativistic
quantum liquid with minimal shear viscosity.
More...
STAR
QM08 Highlights II: STAR Results on Medium Properties and
Response of the Medium to Energetic Partons
By Bedangadas Mohanty, STAR Collaboration
After the discovery of the phenomenon of jet quenching at RHIC,
the focus has been to study the properties of the medium formed
in heavy ion collisions at high energy [1]. The basic approach
has been to use the highly energetic partons available in the
initial stages of the collisions as a probe for the properties
of the subsequent medium that is formed. These partons then
fragment into jets of hadrons and we look for modification to
the properties of these jets. More...
In
Memoriam: Zeev Fraenkel
By Itzhak Tserruya
Professor Zeev
Fraenkel, one of the senior scientists and pioneers of nuclear
physics in Israel, died suddenly of pneumonia on 17 February
2008 in Rehovot, Israel, four days after returning from India
where he attended the last Quark Matter conference.
More...
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.