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.
Direct
Photons at PHENIX
By Gabor David
Like a complicated movie plot, relativistic heavy ion collisions
are a sequence and interplay of very different physics
processes, which nevertheless strongly shape each others outcome
- later ones often masking the effects of previous ones. We are
reasonably certain that the main stages of this evolution are:
modifications of the accelerated nucleus even before it
collides, initial hard scattering of partons, formation and
equilibration of a dense medium, its expansion, transformation
and cooling, and formation of the final state (observable)
particles. More...
The
Equation of State that Controls the Expansion of Matter Created
at RHIC:
QCDOC and NYBlue Join Forces
By Frithjof Karsch
The expansion of hot and dense matter created in a heavy ion
collision at RHIC is controlled by an equation of state which
describes the dependence of the pressure in the medium on its
energy density. Knowledge of the equation of state is, for
instance, indispensable for a correct hydrodynamic modeling of
the expansion of the transient form of matter created in a
gold-gold collision at RHIC.
More...
Diffractive Deep Inelastic Scattering Probes the QCD Vacuum
By Raju Venugopalan
Consider the following scenario: An electron slams into a proton
at rest with an energy 50,000 times the proton rest energy and
in about 1 in 7 such scatterings, nothing happens to the proton.
In contrast, the virtual photon emitted by the scattered
electron showers into a spray of hadrons separated in angle (or
an equivalent unit called rapidity) from the proton. These
striking diffractive events (see Fig. 1a) were observed in Deep
Inelastic Scattering (DIS) experiments with the HERA collider at
DESY, Germany. 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.