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.
Run-8 p↑ + p↑ Collisions at STAR
By Les Bland
One of the primary goals of the recently completed RHIC run 8
was to quantify the gluon density in a heavy nucleus, especially
for gluons that carry very small momentum fractions (x).
Sensitivity to the low-x gluon density is best achieved by study
of deep inelastic scattering experiments. Until there is an
electron ion collider, RHIC is likely to be our best source of
experimental information about the low-x gluon density in heavy
nuclei. Striking gluon density saturation effects were hinted at
for particles produced in the forward direction during run
3, the first RHIC d+Au collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV.
More...
Closing
in on the Spin-Dependent Gluon Distribution
By Daniel de Florian and Werner Vogelsang
Two decades have passed since the European Muon Collaboration
(EMC) at CERN discovered that the spins of the quarks and
anti-quarks in the proton provide only a small fraction of the
proton's spin [1]. This finding, which became famously known as
the "proton spin crisis," initiated much theoretical activity
and motivated further experimental studies of nucleon spin
structure. More...
Revealing the Spin Structure of the Nucleon
By Frank Ellinghaus
The main focus of the physics program at PHENIX and STAR that makes use of RHIC's polarized proton beams is to figure out how and if at all the gluons (the particles which carry the strong nuclear force) inside protons are polarized, or to put it another way, do the spin 1 gluons prefer to have their spins aligned or anti-aligned with the spin of the proton, or do they just not care?
More...
2008
RHIC AGS User’s Meeting
By Abhay Deshpande
Friends the 2008 RHIC AGS User’s meeting will be held on May 27-
May 30, 2008. We hope you will participate with your usual
enthusiasm. The registration page has been setup and can be
found from the User’s Center Web page or directly from the
2008 User’s
meeting webpage. More...
Users' e-Log
Short news items of interest to the RHIC/AGS community. This
week: In Memoriam: Iuliu Stumer, Beautiful Experiments, and More
STAR Ph.Ds. 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.