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-7:
Sometimes Less can be More
by Angelika Drees
Before the most recent Heavy Ion run
of our RHIC accelerator we made – of course – plans and
projected our goals for the 3rd running period with Au nuclei at
full energy (100 GeV) to date. The last run of this kind took
place in the year 2004. In particular, our goals were to
increase the number of bunches in RHIC from 45 to 111, double
the average luminosity per store from 4x1026 cm-2 s-1 to 8x1026
cm-2 s-1, double the peak luminosity from 15x1026 cm-2 s-1 to 30
and, most importantly, double the amount of integrated
luminosity per week from 160 mb-1 to over 300 with a machine
availability of 60% or more at store.
More...
The
Critical Point Search and the STAR Time-of-Flight Upgrade
By Paul Sorensen
The predicted map of nuclear matter contains many exotic and
varied regions. The now familiar nucleus was discovered by Ernst
Rutherford in March 1911. The nucleus was later found to be a
bundle of protons and neutrons which in turn are bundles of
three quarks bound together by gluons. The normal nucleus
represents a small point on the map of nuclear matter. In other
regions, we expect to find phases of matter such as a soup of
unbound quarks and gluons (quark-gluon plasma), various
arrangements of color super-conducting phases, and even a
controversial phase of matter that could involve quarks confined
into nearly massless bundles. The borders between these regions
are phase transitions. The transition from one region to another
can be smooth or abrupt.
More...
RHIC
Low Energy Operations
by Todd Satogata
Part of the challenge of RHIC operations is not only to increase
luminosity at high energies, but to explore low energy
collisions to search for a possible QCD critical point in the
nuclear matter phase diagram. The search for this QCD critical
point has focused on gold-gold collisions in the energy range
sqrt(sNN)=5-50 GeV. The low end of this range is far below the
c.m. energy of RHIC injection collisions of sqrt(s_NN)=19.6 GeV,
and RHIC operation at these low energies encounter several new
challenges.
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.