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.
Ludlam
Named Physics Chair
Thomas Ludlam has been named Chair of the Physics
Department at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven
National Laboratory, effective September 1. He succeeds Sally
Dawson, who had served in the position for two years. More...
Quark-Gluon
Plasma and String Theory
by Pavel Kovtun
What does quark-gluon plasma have to do with black holes? The
question is actually not so silly as it sounds. In fact, black
holes constitute an essential part of the theoretical apparatus
which is used to understand thermal properties of various
strongly interacting QCD-like systems. The whole setup goes by
the name of "AdS/CFT correspondence", and has generated interest
from both QCD and black hole theorists. The number of recent
papers trying to connect black holes to RHIC physics measures in
hundreds, RHIC theorists are invited to major string theory
conferences, and string theorists are invited to major heavy ion
meetings. What is this all about?
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.