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PageThe Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) experiment is an experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. It is an international collaboration of many institutions.
The primary goal of the RHIC physics program is to perform unique and fundamental studies of strongly interacting hadronic systems under extreme conditions of temperature (more than 1 trillion degrees K), pressure, and energy density (more than 30 times that in nuclear matter) that will provide stringent, new tests of the theory of the strong interaction, quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Such extreme conditions are believed to be produced very briefly following the collision of atomic nuclei at very high energy. At STAR we will perform experiments with colliding beams of Au ions at 100 GeV per nucleon.
The principal aims of the RHIC-STAR physics program are to: (1) search for evidence of color deconfinement and/or restoration of chiral symmetry (CSR, basic symmetry of the QCD Lagrangian) in the hot, dense hadronic system which is referred to as a quark-gluon plasma, (2) study the properties of this new state of matter as a means of testing the nonperturbative nature of the strong interaction in completely new regions of temperature, pressure and energy density which are very far removed from those domains traditionally explored by high energy physics (perturbative QCD) and conventional low and medium energy nuclear physics (low energy density and zero temperature), (3) attempt to deduce the dependence of the chiral quark condensate (a metric for nonperturbative QCD effects) on thermodynamic properties of the hot, hadronic system, and (4) take advantage of the high multiplicity hadronic environment produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions as an opportunity to search for exotic, new states of hadronic particles such as the six-quark dibaryon and strange quark matter or strangelets (multi-strange, multi-baryon number stable bound states) which are predicted to exist by a number of models based on QCD but which have not yet been observed.
STAR can also be used for a number of other unique, but more conventional programs including: (1) measurement of two-particle correlations among the many types of hadrons produced in RHIC heavy-ion collisions, e.g. pions, kaons, protons, Lambdas, Xi and their anti-particles, which can be analyzed to obtain new information about hadron-hadron nuclear interactions, (2) determination of the spin-dependent structure function of the proton in new kinematic regions which will help resolve the current mystery concerning what components of the proton wave function account for its spin-dependent form factors, and (3) measurement of the gluon structure functions in nuclei by way of deep inelastic scattering processes in proton + nucleus collisions. The latter is analogous to the famous European Muon Collaboration (EMC) experiments at CERN which measured the quark structure functions of nuclei and which demonstrated many intriguing differences between the quark momentum space distributions in nucleons and the corresponding distributions in nuclei. Similar puzzles might arise, with respect to the gluon distributions, from the RHIC data.
For further information about the Physics of STAR click here.
Click below to access the projects of our group within STAR.
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Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) |
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Offline Software |
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Trigger Software |
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Infrastructure Software |
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STAR Manpower Committee |
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Overview of STAR Physics Results |
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HBT Interferometry |
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Event Structure |
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Two-Particle Dynamical Correlations |
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Strange Particle Production |
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High Transverse Momentum |
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Final State Interactions |
