Our Mission

The Beam Energy Scan Theory (BEST) Collaboration is a Topical Collaboration in Nuclear Theory, funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics for the period 2016-2020.

The BEST Collaboration, involving collaborators from two national laboratories and 11 universities, will construct and provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the results from the ongoing Beam Energy Scan program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The main goals of this program are to discover, or put constraints on the existence, of a critical point in the QCD phase diagram, and to locate the onset of chiral symmetry restoration by observing correlations related to anomalous hydrodynamic effects in quark gluon plasma.

For this purpose, the BEST Collaboration is developing a set of theoretical tools, including hot-dense lattice QCD, initial state models, state-of-the-art hydrodynamic codes incorporating dissipation, hydrodynamic and critical fluctuations, and the effects of the chiral anomaly, as well as hadronic models of the final state of a heavy ion collision. These tools will be used to analyze RHIC Beam Energy Scan data.