Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics

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The goal of this project is the study of collisions between relativisticnuclei and ultimately the determination of the properties of nuclearmatter over a wide range of temperatures and densities. Extremely hot ordense objects which are made of nuclear matter exist in the cosmos;however, without the possibility direct study of the interiors of neutron stars, or of the first moments of a supernova, or of the earliest moments of the Big Bang, one resorts to the challenging studies of finite and transient systems as provided by nucleus-nucleus collisions. Ithas become clear that in order to understand the nuclear equation of stateor to identify a transistion to a new state of matter, the quark-gluonplasma, it will require a comprehensive and correlated set of measurementsas well as extensive calculations which relate the observables to thenuclear matter variables. This project focuses on the acquisition andanalysis of such a set of data using the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR)experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) located atBrookhaven National Laboratory in New York and using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The collection of detector systems which make up both the STAR and CMS experiment provide detailed information about individualcollision events. The UCD group will use data from these detectors toreconstruct the events and infer, from the recorded debris, both thedynamics and the thermodynamics of the collision. By scanning from injection energy at RHIC to the full energy for ions at the LHC, the energy range from twenty to six thousand times the rest mass will be explored.