RUI: The Spin Puzzle, PHENIX, and Heavy Ions with Muhlenberg Undergraduates

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Muhlenberg College faculty and students plan to pursue a research program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists around the world. The research program at Muhlenberg College has two distinct science themes. The first theme concerns the behavior of matter at very high density, corresponding to conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when a hot, dense brew of quarks and gluons existed. One goal of the RHIC program is to recreate these conditions via colliding nuclei at very high energies. The Muhlenberg group will help to characterize some of the properties of the plasma by measuring a quantity called transverse energy. It has been proposed that event-by-event fluctuations in the transverse energy could be a signal for a critical point in the phase diagram of nuclear matter.The second theme concerns the quest to understand the spin of the proton in terms of its underlying constituents of quarks and gluons. The Muhlenberg group will play an important role in an upgrade of the PHENIX detector that will more directly address this issue by detecting so-called W bosons emitted during proton-proton collisions. This collaborative activity at a national laboratory exposes students to research experiences they could not otherwise obtain at a small college. It provides students with new skills and a better understanding of the scientific enterprise, and it can help with informed career choices, whether in physics or in other areas.