Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics

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This award will support the study of collisions between ultra-relativistic nuclei, ultimately leading to a determination of the properties and of the equation of state of nuclear matter over a wide range of temperatures and densities. High energy density physics is a rapidly growing field that spans a broad range of physics sub-disciplines including nuclear physics, plasma physics, laser physics, fluid dynamics, and magnetohydrodynamics. The astrophysics results from new terrestrial and orbital observatories have enabled study of high energy density physics on the stellar, galactic, and universal scales through the study of giant planets, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars, supernovae, gamma-ray bursters, and the big bang. The studies supported by this award of relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions probe the high-temperature region of high energy density physics phase space, where there is a transition from hadron to partonic matter, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Although it is clear that dense quark matter is created in the early stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, identification of the phase transition boundary will require a comprehensive and correlated set of measured collision observables, as well as, realistic and extensive calculations which relate the observables to nuclear matter parameters.For the next three years, efforts will be focused on the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data taken with the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Junior scientists will also participate in an essential way in this research.