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.

Users' Exective Committee Update
By Rene Bellwied
The newly elected RHIC & AGS Users’ Executive Committee (UEC) has started its session for the year with a large agenda containing issues that carry over from the last administration and new issues raised by the current UEC. The following is an update on all topics currently being addressed by the UEC.. More...

J/ψ Measurements in PHENIX
By Tony Frawley
At high enough temperature and density, when the average distance between quarks and gluons in nuclear matter becomes smaller than the average size of a hadron, the color force that holds hadrons together is screened by nearby quarks and gluons in the nuclear matter. Deconfinement occurs when this screening becomes so strong that the light quark hadrons become unbound. More...

Ten Years Before the DAQ
By John Haggerty
One of the defining characteristics of PHENIX is its ability to record data at high rates. That ability has extended the physics reach of PHENIX by allowing it to record more collision events, and more detailed information about the events. In the Au+Au run that ended recently, we were able to record up to 5000 events per second, which is the highest recording rate we have ever achieved. The result of this was writing data at about 600 Mbyte per second, which is almost one CD's worth of data every second. Since 1997, I have been the "DAQ Coordinator" in PHENIX, and had the singular honor of working with a dedicated band of PHENIX collaborators from Brookhaven, Columbia University, Iowa State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and other PHENIX institutions, and this is some of the story of those years. More...

Students Complete Ph.Ds on RHIC Experiments
By Richard Seto and Helen Caines
In future issues, we hope to regularly report on students who have completed their doctorates on RHIC experiments, but the last year has produced a bumper crop of Ph.D. theses on the RHIC experiments. There are so many that it's impossible to report on them all in the space available to us, but we'd like to congratulate them all on the advances they have made in RHIC science. More...