Five years of tracking heavy ion collisions at RHIC

Abstract

Five years have passed since the first collisions of Au nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island. With nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energies of up to √ sNN = 200 GeV RHIC provides the highest energy heavy ion collisions at any existing collider. To study the dynamics of nuclear matter at extreme temperatures and pressures hundreds of produced particles need to be tracked and identified, which provides a sizable challenge to the four experiments. This article tries to summarize these first years of RHIC operation from the detector point of view and give a glimpse at the future of the accelerator and its experiments.

The thermal evolution of nuclear matter at zero temperature and definite baryon number density in chiral perturbation theory

“…As the temperature and the chemical potential increase, there is a transition from hadron matter to quark gluon plasma (QGP). For small chemical potential, experiments at RHIC have found evidences for the existence of idealliquid-like QGP whose properties need further investigations [2,3,4,5], and LHC gives more information about QGP [6,7]. Theoretically, lattice QCD predicts that the transition of hadron phase to QGP is a crossover with a critical temperature in the range 150 MeV ∼ 190 MeV [5,8,9,10].…”

Experimental and phenomenological investigations of femtoscopic correlation functions in heavy- ion collisions

“…Initially, four experiments operated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [81], as shown in Figure 2.1. Two of these, PHENIX [82] and STAR [83], are extensively discussed in this dissertation; the other two, the Broad RAnge Hadron Magnetic Spectrometer (BRAHMS) [84] and PHOBOS [85] were smaller experiments operating for a much shorter period of time.…”