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.
Strangelet
Search at RHIC
By J. Sandweiss
Strange Quark Matter (SQM) are
hypothesized to be nuclei which consist of a single "bag" of up
(u), down (d) and strange (s) quarks. This is in contrast with
ordinary nuclei which are composed of nucleons i.e. groups of
three quarks (two up, one down for protons and two down, one up
for neutrons). The existence of stable SQM was predicted by
Witten in 1984. For a variety of reasons, it has not been
possible to prove or to disprove this hypothesis. Recently an
experiment with STAR at RHIC has added to this situation by
searching for SQM produced in 200 GeV Au-Au collisions. None
were found but limits were set using an ingenious experimental
approach. More...
Sergey
Belikov of PHENIX
Sergey Belikov died early on the morning of October 22, 2007
after living with cancer for six years. Sergey was a physicist
in the Physics Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and
a member of PHENIX collaboration. He was expert in many parts of
the PHENIX experiment, and worked on some of the key parts of
the experiment from the Run Control program that runs the
experiment, to the digitizers used in the electromagnetic
calorimeter and muon tracker, but to those who worked with him,
their memory is of a colleague who was always helpful, always
willing to share what he knew, and never satisfied until he
found a clean solution to a difficult problem.
More...
Three
More Students Complete Ph.Ds on RHIC Experiments
Three more Ph.D.s were granted for work on RHIC experiments
(These are in addition to those announced earlier this year in
the September 25 issue of RHIC News). They are: Yuting Bai, Jonathan Bouchet,
and Mate Csanad. More...
The Daya Bay Experiment
By Steve Kettell
BNL
is one of the host labs for US participation in the
Daya Bay experiment which
will provide the most precise measurement of last unobserved
neutrino mixing angle, θ13, with an expected
sensitivity to sin22θ13 of better than
0.01 at 90% CL after three years of operation. This is an
exciting opportunity to study physics beyond the Standard Model.
The existence of neutrino oscillations requires an extension of
the Standard Model and raises several interesting questions: why
neutrinos have mass and why they are so small (more than 12
orders of magnitude smaller than the top quark)? why two of the
mixing angle are large and one is small? and can neutrino CP
violation explain the matter anti-matter asymmetry in the
universe?
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.