The start of this year's physics run at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) also marks the start of a new era. For the first time since RHIC began operating at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory ...
RHIC's STARdetector, which has been running and evolving since 2000, will also see some firsts in Run 23. Its most recently upgraded components allow the detector to "see" more particles streaming out of collisions closer to the collision point and at wider angles than ever before. This suite of components, which operated successfully in lower-energy collisions, will now collect data from full-energy collisions for the first time. In addition, STAR physicists look forward to flexing the detector's capacity for capturing up to 5,000 collision events per second, more than double its rate in any previous year.
"There's a very rich physics program to be run and great interest worldwide—and in the media—in this physics program," said Jamie Dunlop, Brookhaven Lab Physics Department Associate Chair for Nuclear Physics.
One reason for that interest? RHIC's research delves into the matter that makes up everything visible in the universe today—stars, planets, and even you and me. RHIC scientists use particle collisions to study that matter by effectively turning back the hands of time.
Colliding atomic nuclei at very high energies melts the boundaries of individual protons and neutrons, setting free those particles' innermost building blocks: quarks and gluons. Such a system of "free" quarks and gluons—known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP)—existed in nature some 14 billion years ago, a millionth of a second after the birth of the universe, before protons and neutrons formed. Studying this substance using detectors like STAR and sPHENIX offers clues to why matter behaves the way it does.
An aerial view of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile circumference particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, showing the locations of the STAR and sPHENIX detectors. Run 23 will be the first for sPHENIX and the 23rd for STAR. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
An end-view of the Time Project Chamber of the sPHENIX detector, which will be seeing its first collisions during Run 23 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The top priority of the run will be commissioning all the complex components of sPHENIX. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
The silicon tracker detector modules installed around the beampipe at one end of the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are just one of the recently upgraded STAR components that will see full-energy gold-gold collisions for the first time during Run 23. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
The new Extended Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS) at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) will have more intensity than its predecessor, delivering up to 40 percent more gold beam into the collider than in any previous run. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory