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.
Another
Retreat to Advance RHIC
By Fulvia Pilat
Since the beginning of RHIC operations in 2000, the RHIC Retreat
has been the main forum to address the recent accelerator
performance and prepare the next and future runs. Typically we
hold it about 2 weeks after the end of RHIC operations, when run
memories are still fresh, yet it is early enough for the Retreat
discussions to be relevant in the planning of the machine
shutdown. More...
Are
the Quirks of Quarkyons Lurking in a Low Energy Run?
By Rob Pisarski
The phase diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) has proven to
be a subject full of surprises. The wealth of experimental
results obtained from RHIC to date show that the region which
has been probed, the "strongly-coupled Quark Gluon Plasma," (sQGP)
is much richer than anyone ever expected. This is a region of
high temperature, but where the net baryon density is (very)
low. More...
Search
for the QCD Critical Point at RHIC: First Experience with Au-Au
Collisions at 9.2 GeV
By Tapan Nayak
In thermodynamics, a critical point occurs where the first-order
transition between two phases of matter ceases to exist. On one
side of the point, the two phases are distinct and the
transition from one phase to the other is sharp and typically
characterized by a latent heat. On the other side of the point,
the two phases can co-exist and the transition from one to the
other is a smooth crossover. More...
RHIC—Photon
Collider
By Janet Seger and Yuri Gorbunov
STAR has recently completed and published an extensive analysis
of rho-meson production in 200-GeV ultraperipheral Au-Au
collisions at RHIC [1]. Ultraperipheral “collisions”—where the
gold nuclei pass in close proximity to each other but don’t
actually overlap—are ubiquitous at RHIC. More...
Users' e-Log
Short news items of interest to the RHIC/AGS community. This
week: One Year of RHIC News, New Ph.Ds From BRAHMS, and New
Director for Jefferson Lab. 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.