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.
RHIC
Summer Sunday
by Achim Franz and Todd Satogata
July and August brings the usual Long Island summer with its
heat and humidity, but for nearly a decade it has a Sunday
attraction that brings many visitors to BNL -- usually more than
a thousand in one day! The BNL Summer Sunday Tours are held on
several Sundays during the summer. Each Summer Sunday highlights
a different department, from the firemen to the NOAA weather
station. The largest Summer Sunday is usually the one devoted to
RHIC, which was held on August 19. More...
U.S.
LARP at RHIC
By Wolfram Fischer
You may have wondered what the label “LARP” on RHIC’s integrated
luminosity chart means. LARP stands for “LHC Accelerator
Research Program” and the luminosity delivered at IP10 was to
test a luminosity monitor for the LHC. The monitor was built at
LBNL, tested at BNL, and will be shipped to CERN. Within the
Collider-Accelerator Department, A. Drees was responsible for
the test.
More...
Report
from the Early Time Dynamics in Heavy Ion Collisions
By Agnes Mocsy
For the past few decades, a goal of the nuclear physics
community has been to produce and characterize a new state of
matter, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). In 1999 the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL turned on and began producing a
state of matter more remarkable than predicted. In April 2005
the discovery of strongly coupled QGP, which behaves as a
perfect liquid was announced and covered extensively by
mainstream media. The current experimental results, however,
still cannot be understood in a comprehensive and quantitative
way in lack of understanding the early time dynamics in heavy
ion collisions. By early times, we mean the time between the
physical contact of two heavy nuclei and the formation of the
locally thermalized QGP.
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.