About the RIKEN BNL Research Center
Message from the Director
In 2017 the RIKEN BNL Research Center (RBRC) celebrates its 20th anniversary since its inauguration in 1997. This is also the year of the 100th anniversary of RIKEN. RBRC begins this new era with plans for construction of a major detector upgrade, sPHENIX. Like the long lived bird of Greek mythology, revived from the ashes, the sPHENIX experiment will continue the important mission of RHIC. RBRC will continue to play a major role in the sPHENIX era, attracting outstanding theoretical and experimental physicists and they are the basis of RBRC's vibrancy, relevance, and productivity. RBRC personnel are making leading contributions to the discovery, interpretation and simulation of new phenomena at RHIC. The continued productivity is due to improvements
For the future, RBRC is working on aspects of eRHIC and is exploring with RIKEN and BNL research opportunities in related fields—in particular BNL’s cosmology activities on LSST.
In this memorial year I have assumed the position of Acting Director of RBRC, effective April 1, 2017, following the great history of the former RBRC directors, Tsung-Dao Lee, Nicholas Samios and Samuel Aronson. I am concurrently appointed as the Director of RIKEN Nishina Center, but will be scheduled here at Brookhaven National Laboratory site one week per month.
Acting Director Hideto En'yo
Message from the Deputy Director
Research at the RIKEN BNL Research Center includes vigorous activities in both experimental and theoretical physics.
Experimental research includes studies at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider: the collisions of heavy ions at ultrarelativistic energies, spin physics in proton-proton collisions, and eventually into electron nucleus collisions at a proposed eRHIC facility.
There is a large and vigorous effort in Lattice Gauge Theory. This includes the study of hadronic physics, such as the computation of weak matrix elements, and computing the thermodynamic behavior of Quantum Chromodynamics.
There is also a strong interest in the theory of High Energy Nuclear Physics, including: saturation and the Color Glass Condensate; the phenomenology of heavy ion collisions; the nature of the Quark Gluon Plasma near the transition temperature (the “semi” QGP); cold dense quark matter (“quarkyonic”); and applications of the AdS/CFT correspondence
