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
Quarks in Heavy-Ion Collisions by Manuel Calderón de la
Barca Sánchez
One of the most talked about topics in the physics of Heavy-Ion
collisions is studying the production of heavy quarkonium
states. This is one of the studies that aims to obtain
information about possible formation of a Quark-Gluon Plasma in
the laboratory.
More...
STAR Mid-Rapidity Upgrades: The Detector
Gets Even Better by Jim Thomas for the STAR Collaboration
STAR was constructed to investigate the behavior of strongly
interacting matter at high energy density and to search for
signatures of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Key features of the
nuclear environment at RHIC are a large number of produced
particles (typically about 1500 into the acceptance of the
detectors at mid-rapidity) and high momentum particles from hard
parton scattering. STAR’s primary scientific mission is to
understand the evolution of the collision process in
ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions and to measure as many
signatures of the hypothesized strongly interacting QGP phase
transition as possible. More...
Do
Strange Particles Still Deserve Their Given Name? by Mark
Heinz, Yale University
The enhanced production of strange particles in heavy ion
collisions is considered an important signature of the presence
of a Quark-Gluon Plasma and hence one of the reasons for the
RHIC experiments. Quantitative predictions of the enhancement as
a function of collision centrality, i.e. amount of nuclear
overlap, can be obtained from statistical model calculations. In
contrast to these models and the initial heavy ion measurement
at CERN, STAR has observed that the enhancements of strange
baryons do not scale linearly with the number of participants, a
measure of collision centrality. 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.