Relativistic Heavy Ion Collision Studies with the RHIC STAR Experiment

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The main physics goals of this project are two-fold: 1) to create in thelaboratory a new state of matter called "Quark Matter" by heating/compressing normal nuclear matter to a sufficiently high temperature/density, and, equally important, 2) to uniquely determine whether such atransformation to Quark Matter has actually taken place. Quark Matter iscomposed of "free" quarks and gluons, the fundamental particles whichare bound into protons and neutrons which make up normal nuclear matter. Itis predicted that the Universe was entirely in the Quark Matter stateseveral millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The method which we will useto make Quark Matter will be to collide beams of heavy nuclei (e.g. leadon lead and gold on gold) moving at speeds near the speed of light.These beams will be generated by new state-of-the-art particle acceleratorslocated at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and at the CERNlaboratory in Geneva. To determine whether Quark Matter has actuallybeen created in these high energy heavy ion collisions, large particledetectors will be present to detect the secondary particles which are produced(mostly pi and K mesons and a range of more exotic particles). Theoriespredict that unique signatures for Quark Matter formation can beextracted from information obtained from these secondary particles. One of themain roles of the Ohio State University group in these experiments is to leadthe analysis of the data from a new type of particle detector which OSUhas taken part in developing called a "Silicon Drift Detector" and,hopefully, to extract unique Quark Matter signatures.5