About the Author

Abhay Deshpande is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University, and has been a member of the PHENIX experiment and the RHIC Spin Collaboration since 2000. He is Chair of the RHIC & AGS Users Executive Committee.

RHIC-AGS Annual Users' Meeting 2007

By Abhay Deshpande

AbhayThe 2007 RHIC & AGS Annual Users’ Meeting was held at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on June 18-22, 2007. Rene Bellwied (Wayne State), the 2006 Chair Elect of the User’s Executive Committee,  led the organization of this year’s meeting. The structure of the meeting was a little different compared to the previous years. Usually, there are plenary sessions and there are topical workshops in which all experimental talks in the User’s meeting are presentations on behalf of the RHIC experiments. A speaker usually presents his or her experiment’s view of a particular physics topic. This year, the workshop organizers were asked to seek speakers from experimental collaborations who would be able to present a particular topic, which included results from all experiments and discuss their global significance. Thus, the focus was on RHIC science  “What have we learnt within the last year from RHIC?” rather than “What did we learn in the last year from PHENIX or STAR, separately?”. It was felt by the organizers that as a result of this change, the speakers, especially the young and inexperienced ones, would seek more information and learn more about their science when they find out how the other experiments at RHIC perform the same measurements. It was also expected that this would encourage more communication across the experimental collaborations at the grass roots level. Early concerns about this being too difficult, and hence, unfair to our younger users at RHIC were put to rest by some of the broadest and most exhaustive expositions of RHIC results presented by the youngest amongst us. The excitement and the enthusiasm of why we do what we do, was felt not only in the sessions, but also in the corridors through the passionate, animated and some time even heated discussions. Ample sprinkling of theory talks in the plenary sessions and the workshops tried to arrive at conclusions about what all these data mean for our understanding of the hot dense systems we seem to be creating at RHIC and of the nucleon spin.
 
When the planning for the User’s meeting began, the prospect of Run-7 seemed bleak. However,  as things developed,  although short, Run-7 became a reality, thanks to the efforts by BNL management,  the UEC, and of course, our supporters at the DOE in the office of nuclear physics. By the time of the User’s meeting, it was indeed apparent that this run was going to be a huge success. As such, a few plenary talks, dedicated to the performance of the collider and the experiment were  inserted in to the program.  Users and visitors got to see grand result summaries from RHIC data so far and their interpretations,  both for heavy ion as well as polarized proton collision physics. They also saw summaries of Run-7, both in the collider-performance and the experiments’  data taking.  Not only did RHIC deliver record luminosity, both PHENIX and STAR detectors accumulated more than three times their cumulative Au-Au data sets compared to Run-3. Also presented in the plenary session were talks about the future science using RHIC including the science of RHIC II luminosity upgrade and that of the Electron Ion Collider (EIC). The Interim Laboratory Deputy Director Peter Bond and the Laboratory Director Sam Aronson, in their presentations assured the users of the Lab’s intention to keep RHICII and the EIC as the short and long term goals of the Lab management.   All talks from this year’s Users meeting will be available from this this web page.  if  they are not available already , as this article goes to print.
 
One of the main events of every RHIC & AGS user’s meeting is the presentation of the best thesis awards.  A committee of four from the User’s Executive Council normally goes through the entries submitted for this competition and selects two of the very best. As a testimony to the great effort the students themselves, their mentors & collaborators put in to these finished products (the theses and the young researchers who write them),  the selection of two from all the entries was especially difficult this year. Hence five theses were selected: three (Nathan Grau, Taku Gunji,  Sevil Salur) were given honorable mentions. The two best theses awardees were Hiromi Okada and Corey Reed. The laboratory director Sam Aronson presented the certificates and prizes. Seen in the picture are the awardees and the director after the award ceremony. 

Winners

The 2007 thesis-award- winner  with the Laboratory Director, Sam Aronson, after the award s presentation. From left to right, Nathan Grau, Taku Gunji, Hiromi Okada, Sam Aronson, Cory Reed, Sevil Salur.

Two other events deserve a special mention. First: an informal introduction to the new Associate Laboratory Director, Steve Vigdor (presently Indiana University). Steve will be the new ALD for Nuclear and Particle Physics starting September 1st, 2007. He gave an informal preview on his ideas and thoughts of RHIC’s short- and long-term future and took questions from the floor. Secondly, this year the User meeting dinner was held at the “Andrews by the Pond”, a restaurant in Wading River, NY. By all accounts it was a welcome change and those who attended seemed happy with the place, the setting and the food.
 
There is a saying that behind every successful event there is a hard working local organizing team (ok, this is not how the saying goes… but I have modified it for our purpose!). Here the principle scientific organizers of the User’s meeting were backed by a crew of four fabulous women: Kelly Guiffreda, Angela Melocoton, Regina Robinson & Susan White DePace, who ran the show from behind the scenes, so that we could focus on the science. They deserve our sincere thanks for all their help and effort.