An Experiment at RHIC--to measure rare processes involving
photons, leptons and identified hadrons to the highest luminosities
Welcome to the BNL group of
the PHENIX experiment at the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
(RHIC) in Upton,
NY.
Please find links to the individual group members and more information
about the experiment on the left navigation bar.
This currently under construction, if you have comments or suggestions
please
send me an email.
The BNL PHENIX group in the Physics Department has
responsibility for the operation and physics exploitation of the
PHENIX experiment as well as for specific subsystems. The group has
specific responsibility for the Electromagnetic Calorimeter (EMCal),
Time Expansion Chamber/Transition Radiation Detector (TEC/TRD), Zero
Degree Calorimeter/Shower Max Detector (ZDC), Online
Control, Data Acquisition, Offline software and Magnet subsystems and
an important role in the Hadron Blind Detector (HBD). Group members
devote 100% of their effort to RHIC physics nominally divided roughly
50-50 between detector/operations and physics research, but more
realistically 40-60 due to operations exigencies. Typical group
activities include data taking and manning
shifts for the run in progress, which also involves detector testing,
installation, study and implementation of improvements, commissioning
and preparation of hardware and software for incremental upgrades,
calibration and monitoring, while at the same time finishing analyzing
data from the past year’s run as well as analyzing the present year’s
data and preparing for the next year’s run. Research activities in
which the group plays a leading role follow from the detector and
technical responsibilities (and vice-versa). These include:
- Global event characterization (ZDC) and event-by-event
fluctuations (EMCal, global tracking)
- Coulomb dissociation (ZDC)
- High transverse momentum pizero, photon and electron
physics (EMCal, TEC/TRD)
- Identified charged hadrons (global tracking, TEC/TRD)
- Anti-neutron physics (EMCal, global tracking)
- Charm physics (EMCal, global tracking, TEC/TRD)
- Search for new Physics using Parity Violation as a probe
- Flavor identified structure functions using parity
violating W±production (EMCal, global tracking, TEC/TRD)
- Polarized gluon structure function using direct photons
(EMCal)
in both nuclear and polarized proton collisions. The study of
PHENIX detector upgrades and improvements, as well as other future
possibilities at RHIC, also form an important part of our group’s
activities. The main focus of research is to follow up on the major
discoveries made by this group in the first few years of Au+Au
collisions at RHIC: suppression of π0 from
hard-scattering (pT≥ 2 GeV/c) compared to point-like scaling
from p+p
collisions due to an interaction with the medium;
anomalously large p±/π± ratio in the range
2<pT<4.5 GeV/c
compared to p+p collisions where the particles in this region are
produced by fragmentation of jets from hard-scattering; increase in the
charged particle multiplicity and transverse energy ET per
participant pair with increasing centrality; first measurement of charm
particles (in Au+Au collisions) via their large branching ratio to e±
and discovery of several interesting properties using this method,
notably flow, suppression at large pT and point-like scaling
of the number of charm particles produced as a function of centrality;
point-like scaling of direct photon production as a
function of centrality in Au+Au collisions.
Last Modified: Thursday, 16-Feb-2006 17:29:55 EST
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