PHENIX detector

Last updated

The PHENIX detector (for Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) is the largest of the four experiments that have taken data at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States.

Contents

Overview

PHENIX is an exploratory experiment for the investigation of high energy collisions of heavy ions and protons, and is designed specifically to measure direct probes of the collisions such as electrons, muons, and photons. The primary goal of PHENIX is to discover and study a new state of matter called quark–gluon plasma (QGP). Detecting and understanding the QGP allows us to understand better the universe in the moments after the Big Bang.

The PHENIX Experiment consists of a collection of detectors, each of which perform a specific role in the measurement of the results of a heavy ion collision. The detectors are grouped into two central arms, which are capable of measuring a variety of particles including pions, protons, kaons, deuterons, photons, and electrons, and two muon arms which focus on the measurement of muon particles. There are also additional event characterization detectors that provide additional information about a collision, and a set of three huge magnets that bend the trajectories of the charged particles. These detectors work together in an advanced high-speed data acquisition system to collect information about the event and subsequently investigate properties of the QGP.

The experiment consists of a collaboration of more than 400 scientists and engineers from around the world. The collaboration is led by a spokesperson, elected by members every three years, along with a team of deputies and other appointed members who oversee various aspects of operating the detector and managing the large group of scientist and institutions affiliated with it. Past and present spokespeople include Shoji Nagamiya (1992–1998), William Allen Zajc (1998–2006), and Barbara Jacak (2007–2012).

The physics of PHENIX

The PHENIX collaboration performs basic research with high energy collisions of heavy ions and protons. The primary mission of PHENIX is the following:

See also

Further reading

K. Adcox et al. (PHENIX Collaboration) (2005). "Formation of dense partonic matter in relativistic nucleus–nucleus collisions at RHIC: Experimental evaluation by the PHENIX Collaboration". Nuclear Physics A . 757 (1–2): 184–283. arXiv: nucl-ex/0410003 . Bibcode:2005NuPhA.757..184A. doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysa.2005.03.086. S2CID   119511423.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Particle physics</span> Study of subatomic particles and forces

Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the study of combination of protons and neutrons is called nuclear physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Compact Muon Solenoid</span> General-purposes experiment at the Large Hadron Collider

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France. The goal of the CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider</span> Particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, USA

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is the first and one of only two operating heavy-ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used by an international team of researchers, it is the only operating particle collider in the US. By using RHIC to collide ions traveling at relativistic speeds, physicists study the primordial form of matter that existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. By colliding spin-polarized protons, the spin structure of the proton is explored.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-energy nuclear physics</span> Intersection of nuclear physics and high-energy physics

High-energy nuclear physics studies the behavior of nuclear matter in energy regimes typical of high-energy physics. The primary focus of this field is the study of heavy-ion collisions, as compared to lighter atoms in other particle accelerators. At sufficient collision energies, these types of collisions are theorized to produce the quark–gluon plasma. In peripheral nuclear collisions at high energies one expects to obtain information on the electromagnetic production of leptons and mesons that are not accessible in electron–positron colliders due to their much smaller luminosities.

Hadronization is the process of the formation of hadrons out of quarks and gluons. There are two main branches of hadronization: quark-gluon plasma (QGP) transformation and colour string decay into hadrons. The transformation of quark-gluon plasma into hadrons is studied in lattice QCD numerical simulations, which are explored in relativistic heavy-ion experiments. Quark-gluon plasma hadronization occurred shortly after the Big Bang when the quark–gluon plasma cooled down to the Hagedorn temperature when free quarks and gluons cannot exist. In string breaking new hadrons are forming out of quarks, antiquarks and sometimes gluons, spontaneously created from the vacuum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">STAR detector</span>

The STAR detector is one of the four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ALICE experiment</span>

ALICE is one of nine detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The experiment is designed to study the conditions that are thought to have existed immediately after the Big Bang by measuring properties of quark-gluon plasma.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DØ experiment</span> Particle physics research project (1983–2011)

The DØ experiment was a worldwide collaboration of scientists conducting research on the fundamental nature of matter. DØ was one of two major experiments located at the Tevatron Collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The Tevatron was the world's highest-energy accelerator from 1983 until 2009, when its energy was surpassed by the Large Hadron Collider. The DØ experiment stopped taking data in 2011, when the Tevatron shut down, but data analysis is still ongoing. The DØ detector is preserved in Fermilab's DØ Assembly Building as part of a historical exhibit for public tours.

Color-glass condensate (CGC) is a type of matter theorized to exist in atomic nuclei when they collide at near the speed of light. During such collision, one is sensitive to the gluons that have very small momenta, or more precisely a very small Bjorken scaling variable. The small momenta gluons dominate the description of the collision because their density is very large. This is because a high-momentum gluon is likely to split into smaller momentum gluons. When the gluon density becomes large enough, gluon-gluon recombination puts a limit on how large the gluon density can be. When gluon recombination balances gluon splitting, the density of gluons saturate, producing new and universal properties of hadronic matter. This state of saturated gluon matter is called the color-glass condensate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Allen Zajc</span> American nuclear physicist

William Allen Zajc is a U.S. physicist and the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics at Columbia University in New York, USA, where he has worked since 1987.

In high-energy physics, jet quenching is a phenomenon that can occur in the collision of ultra-high-energy particles. In general, the collision of high-energy particles can produce jets of elementary particles that emerge from these collisions. Collisions of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion particle beams create a hot and dense medium comparable to the conditions in the early universe, and then these jets interact strongly with the medium, leading to a marked reduction of their energy. This energy reduction is called "jet quenching".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quark–gluon plasma</span> Phase of quantum chromodynamics (QCD)

Quark–gluon plasma is an interacting localized assembly of quarks and gluons at thermal and chemical (abundance) equilibrium. The word plasma signals that free color charges are allowed. In a 1987 summary, Léon Van Hove pointed out the equivalence of the three terms: quark gluon plasma, quark matter and a new state of matter. Since the temperature is above the Hagedorn temperature—and thus above the scale of light u,d-quark mass—the pressure exhibits the relativistic Stefan-Boltzmann format governed by temperature to the fourth power and many practically massless quark and gluon constituents. It can be said that QGP emerges to be the new phase of strongly interacting matter which manifests its physical properties in terms of nearly free dynamics of practically massless gluons and quarks. Both quarks and gluons must be present in conditions near chemical (yield) equilibrium with their colour charge open for a new state of matter to be referred to as QGP.

In high-energy nuclear physics, strangeness production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a signature and diagnostic tool of quark–gluon plasma (QGP) formation and properties. Unlike up and down quarks, from which everyday matter is made, heavier quark flavors such as strange and charm typically approach chemical equilibrium in a dynamic evolution process. QGP is an interacting localized assembly of quarks and gluons at thermal (kinetic) and not necessarily chemical (abundance) equilibrium. The word plasma signals that color charged particles are able to move in the volume occupied by the plasma. The abundance of strange quarks is formed in pair-production processes in collisions between constituents of the plasma, creating the chemical abundance equilibrium. The dominant mechanism of production involves gluons only present when matter has become a quark–gluon plasma. When quark–gluon plasma disassembles into hadrons in a breakup process, the high availability of strange antiquarks helps to produce antimatter containing multiple strange quarks, which is otherwise rarely made. Similar considerations are at present made for the heavier charm flavor, which is made at the beginning of the collision process in the first interactions and is only abundant in the high-energy environments of CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Bedangadas Mohanty is an Indian physicist specialising in experimental high energy physics, and is affiliated to National Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhubaneswar. He has been awarded the Infosys Prize in Physical Sciences for 2021 that was announced on 2 December 2021. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2015, the highest science award in India, in the physical sciences category. He has been elected as the fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and National Academy of Sciences, India. In 2020, he was elected as a fellow of American Physical Society.

Helen Louise Caines is a Professor of Physics at Yale University. She studies the quark–gluon plasma and is the co-spokesperson for the STAR experiment.

Olga Evdokimov is a Russian born professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). She is a High Energy Nuclear Physicist, who currently collaborates on two international experiments; the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

Claude Pruneau is a Canadian-American experimental high-energy nuclear physicist. He is a professor of physics at Wayne State University and the author of several books. He is best known for his work on particle correlation measurements in heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider.

Saskia Mioduszewski is a nuclear physicist and professor at Texas A&M University.

Julia Apostolova Velkovska is a Bulgarian-American high energy particle physicist who is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University. Her research considers nuclear matter in the extreme conditions generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. She hopes that this work will help to explain the mechanisms that underpin the strong force.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WA93 experiment</span> High energy physics experiment

WA93 experiment was a detector experiment conducted at CERN for studying the correlations between photons and charged particles. It was an experimental program of CERN and part of the research programme SPS. The experiment was majorly conducted by the Indian High-Energy Heavy Ion Physics Team at CERN-SPS. For measurement of the multiplicity and the rapidity and azimuthal distributions of photons in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, Photon Multiplicity Detector was implemented in the experiment. The experiment was led by Indian physicist Y P Viyogi. Hans H. Gutbrod was the spokesperson of the experimental project. The experimental project was approved on 22 November 1990. The experiment was completed on 9th May 2002.

References

  1. Kotov, D. O.; et al. (2016). "Strangeness production in PHENIX experiment". Journal of Physics: Conference Series. 668 (12017): 012017. Bibcode:2016JPhCS.668a2017K. doi: 10.1088/1742-6596/668/1/012017 .
  2. Csanád, M.; et al. (2020). "Exploring the QCD phase diagram via the collision energy dependence of multi-particle femtoscopy with PHENIX". Journal of Physics: Conference Series. 1602 (12009): 012009. arXiv: 2007.04751 . Bibcode:2020JPhCS1602a2009C. doi: 10.1088/1742-6596/1602/1/012009 .

40°52′59″N72°52′54″W / 40.8831°N 72.8817°W / 40.8831; -72.8817