Support for the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Group of the Nuclear Structure Research Laboratory at the University of Rochester

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Research in relativistic heavy ions will be carried out making use of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The research will include development of a specialized detector known as PHOBOS for use at RHIC. PHOBOS will provide a first look at the behavior and decay of matter at the extreme energy densities that will be created in gold-on-gold collisions with energies of 100GeV/nucleon in the center-of-mass system. This work is aimed at characterizing the hypothesized quark-gluon plasma which is created in such energies collisions, and in which quarks and gluons are thought to be deconfined, unlike the case in normal hadronic matter. In addition, research will be carried out at the BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron facility. This experiment will probe the dynamics of hadron-hadron interactions at lower energies than RHIC, where the details of the interactions are better understood and where improved understanding will permit needed extrapolations of the behavior of ordinary hadronic matter of RHIC energies. These data will extend our knowledge of matter to energies and densities thought to have existed only in the first microseconds of the early universe. This topic is a high priority within US nuclear science, as established by the joint NSF/DOE Nuclear Science Advisory Committee in its 1996 Long Range Plan. Education of students and postdocs is a strong component of this experimental program.