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RHIC: In Pursuit of the Plasma

Join the international effort to catch the elusive Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) hiding in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) hide-out. Explore the QGP's disguises, characteristics, and its connection to the early universe. Stay tuned for updates on the investigation!

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RHIC: In Pursuit of the Plasma

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  1. RHIC: In Pursuit of the Plasma BNL Summer Sunday 8/26/01

  2. Briefing Outline • Our Suspect is... • the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) • Who is a known informant... • about the basic building blocks of nature • An All Points Bulletin has been issued… • QGP hide-outs are being monitored.

  3. Quark-Gluon Plasma Dossier The QGP appears after a phase transition... Atom Nucleus Key Proton Neutron Quarks Held together M.O. : Within the QGP, the Quarks are set free! by gluons Gluons

  4. What is a phase transition? ICE WATER STEAM Add heat Add heat SOLID LIQUID GAS These are the phases of matter we see in ournormal lives.

  5. Phase Transitions and the QGP Protons and Neutrons Quarks

  6. Quark-Gluon Plasma Hideouts Hard to stake out. It happened billions of years ago. • The Early Universe • Neutron Stars • Collisions of Nuclei Hard to stake out. They are very far away. (possibly) Easy to stake out. We can make these ourselves!

  7. The QGP in the Early Universe

  8. How To Catch A Plasma Take two of the heaviest nuclei we can use. Grab a particle accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, to accelerate them close to the speed of light. Crash them together to create our own QGP hide-out. Surround the hide-out site with surveillance equipment.

  9. A briefing on RHIC { Relativistic Einstein’s relativityE=mc2, near light speed { Heavy Ion Elements like gold,without electrons { Collider Two ion beams hit head-on

  10. Route 25 William Floyd Pkwy. R H I C BNL Campus The Location of RHIC Berkner Hall

  11. Setting Up A Trap for the QGP

  12. A briefing on RHIC • RHIC’s particle beams reach 99.995% of the speed of light! • That’s 186,000 miles per second, or over 60 million miles per hour!!! • There are billions of ions in RHIC when it is operating with thousands of collisions each second! • The energy in each collision is about the same as two mosquitoes colliding. • Over 20 years, less than one gram of gold is used.

  13. A look inside the RHIC tunnel Over 1,600 miles of superconducting cable and over 78,100 pounds of helium! The magnets are cooled to -450 degrees Fahrenheit

  14. PHOBOS STAR RHIC Surveillance Teams and Equipment

  15. Mounting an International Operation Detectives from all over the world are searching for the Quark-Gluon Plasma. There are more than 1000 scientists participating in the 4 RHIC experiments.

  16. The QGP: A Master of Disguise and Deception

  17. A Simulation of a Collision at RHIC The elusive Quark-Gluon Plasma puts on a disguise and hides in a crowd. In a head-on Gold-on-Gold collision, there are thousands of particles produced!

  18. A Surveillance Photo of a Collision at RHIC A single Gold-on-Gold collision as seen by the STAR experiment. Taken this month.

  19. More Surveillance Photos A single Gold-on-Gold collision as seen by PHENIX. Taken this month.

  20. And More Surveillance Photos A single Gold-on-Gold collision as seen by PHOBOS. Taken this month.

  21. And Even More Surveillance Photos A single Gold-on-Gold collision as seen by BRAHMS. Taken this month.

  22. Debriefing: The Evidence So Far... • The RHIC hide-out draws a large crowd of particles. • We count more than 5000 particles produced in each head-on collision! • The RHIC hide-out’s thermostat is set very high - the QGP likes it hot. • The temperature of the hide-out has been measured to be 2 trillion degrees Celsius, or 100,000 times the temperature of the sun!

  23. Debriefing: The Evidence So Far... • The hide-out is beginning to look like the early universe - a known QGP hide-out. • We see almost as much anti-matter as matter. • We may have already caught a glimpse of our suspect! • The picture is still fuzzy, but more data should clear it up.

  24. Processing the Data as we speak! Tape Robots for Data Storage Racks of Personal Computers (running LINUX) • Includes 1,200 individual CPU’s! • Disk storage equal to 5,000 home PC’s (50,000 GigaBytes)! • If we were to put each year’s worth of data on floppy disks, we could pave all lanes of the LIE from here to New York City with them!

  25. The Pursuit of the Plasma Continues RHIC is taking data right now! The detectives are busy sifting through the data. Our suspect is still at large. Stay tuned for more news soon...

  26. The RHIC Hide-0ut: Drawing a large crowd Data Taken June 25, 2000. A grazing collision

  27. The RHIC Hide-0ut: Drawing a large crowd Data Taken June 25, 2000. A Head-on Collision

  28. The RHIC Hide-0ut and the Early Universe In the Early Universe, the ratio of Anti-matter to matter was about 1.0. Increasing collision energy RHIC Au+Au Anti-matter/matter All 4 experiments agree! s1/2 [GeV]

  29. The RHIC Hide-0ut: How hot is it? The center of the collision acts like a gas. The temperature of any gas can be determined from the velocity of the molecules (or particles).

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