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.
The Nuclear Physics Long Range Plan: The Stakes for BNL
by Tom Ludlam
The Department of Energy and National Science Foundation are now
in the final stages of a year-long effort to prepare a Long
Range Plan for Nuclear Science that will set the agenda for the
next ten years of U.S. research in nuclear physics.
More...
Light Messengers From Heavy Quarks: What Electrons Reveal About the Medium Produced at RHIC
by Ralf Averbeck
High energy collisions of gold nuclei at RHIC produce a hot and
dense phase of matter that resembles the state of the universe a
few microseconds after the big bang. Remarkably, this primordial
substance made of strongly interacting constituents was found to
be characterized best as an almost "perfect" fluid, i.e. a
medium with almost vanishing viscosity. Key observations that
led to this conclusion include a strong suppression of high
energy pions and other light particles, commonly interpreted in
terms of energy loss of light quarks and gluons while these
propagate through the medium. More...
New Director for RHIC and ATLAS Computing Facility
by Thomas Throwe
After ten years as Director of the RHIC and ATLAS Computing
Facilities, Bruce Gibbard requested that a new director of the
facilities be sought so that he could pursue ATLAS physics as it
starts to take data. An international search for a new directory
was initiated, which resulted in Michael Ernst joining BNL as
the new director of the facilities on 1 February 2007. 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.