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.
Heavy
Ion Physics with the ATLAS Detector by Peter Steinberg
The LHC is set to be a major part of the physics of the next
decade. However, one oft-neglected fact is that the LHC has the
potential not just for discovering new particles, but for
creating the same "near-perfect fluid" we create at RHIC -- but
hotter, denser, and longer-lived. Brookhaven is a major
institution in the ATLAS experiment, with almost 1800 scientific
collaborators.
More...
Stochastic
Cooling in RHIC by Mike Blaskiewicz
During heavy ion operations a typical RHIC bunch contains about
a billion particles. The individual particles undergo transverse
focusing by the magnets and are kept longitudinally bunched by
electric fields generated by radio frequency (RF) cavities. The
energy spread of the beam increases to the point that the RF can
no longer keep all the particles bunched. This results in fewer
collisions, reducing useful physics data. The purpose of the
stochastic cooling system is to keep the beam bunched. More...
Measuring
Fluctuations in RHIC Collisions
by
Jeffrey Mitchell
A new form of nuclear matter that appears to have the properties
of a perfect liquid is currently being studied at RHIC. This new
form of matter is created in collisions of pairs of ions that
initially contain ordinary nuclear matter. During the
collisions, the nuclear matter is heated and compressed to a
very high degree. At some point during the collision, the matter
goes through a phase transition to the new state.
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.