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The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider
The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider
My primary research takes place at Brookhaven National Lab's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) pictured here. RHIC collides gold ions at relativistic speeds, up to 99.996% the speed of light (or 100 GeV/nucleon).
A large nucleus like gold traveling at relativistic speeds is contracted from its spherical shape into a pancake. These pancakes are smashed together. ⬇
These violent collisions allow us to melt the protons and neutrons that make up the gold nucleus to create a super hot and dense phase of matter made of quarks and gluons called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP).
Nuclear Phase Diagram
Nuclear Phase Diagram
RHIC allows us to turn up and down the temperature of the quark-gluon plasma. By tuning the collider we can explore the phase diagram of nuclear matter.
My research is attempting to identify the location of the critical point in the phase diagram. This yellow point on the diagram shown here marks the temperature and density at which the phase transition from the plasma to hadronic matter becomes a crossover transition. To the right of this point, the plasma and hadronic phases are distinct. To the left, the two phases blend together into a supercritical fluid.
We have a detector that uses a large solenoid to produce strong magnetic fields. A nuclear collision produces a ton of particles which we can track. The magnetic field allows us to track how these particles curve in order to determine their charge and momentum. The detector is called the STAR detector which stands for Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC.
We can count the number of protons we observe in many gold nucleus collisions because these protons leave tracks when they whizz through STAR's gas-filled detection volume.
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