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.
Notes
From the Associate Director
By Steven Vigdor
I will try to provide roughly monthly updates in the RHIC News
on items of RHIC/AGS policy of general interest to users. In
this first communication, I have good news and bad news. Let me
start with the bad news, since this may call for some
involvement by users. More...
System
Size, Energy, Centrality and Pseudorapidity Dependence of
Charged Particle Density in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at RHIC
By Rachid Nouicer
In ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions, the charged particle
multiplicities have been studied extensively because of the
intrinsic interest in understanding the production
mechanism. More recent interest comes in the context of
searching for and studying new forms of matter that are expected
to be created in heavy ion collisions at these energies. A key
quantity that contains information about the longitudinal
aspects of the multiparticle production process, and that has
provided valuable input for discriminating between
phenomenological models in the past, is the rapidity
distribution of identified particles.
More...
PHENIX
Preparing for Run 8
By Don Lynch
As summer ends, the weather cools, and the leaves begin to
fall, it is once again time to button up the PHENIX experiment
and prepare for the next RHIC run. From June to September each
year the RHIC accelerators are shut down and the annual rituals
of maintenance, upgrades and enhancements are undertaken by the
technical staffs of the Collider-Accelerator Department and the
major experiments at RHIC.
More...
First
Beam in Run 8
By Fulvia Pilat
Together
with the glorious foliage and the kids happily back in school,
autumn this year, brought back another cycle of RHIC operations,
as it has been possible to start Run-8 even in the presence of a
budget continuing resolution. This is extremely beneficial to
the effective running of operations in that it avoids last year
conflicting needs of progressively delaying the schedule while
keeping the accelerators ready to go. 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.