Studies of Relativisitic Heavy Ion Collision at CERN and RHIC

CERN 和 RHIC 的相对论重离子碰撞研究

• 批准号: 9803859
• 负责人: Thomas Humanic
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Ohio State University Research Foundation -DO NOT USE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing grant
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-06-01 至 2002-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9803859&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Studies; Relativisitic; Heavy; Ion; Collision

The main physics goals of this project are two-fold: 1) to create in the laboratory 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 a transformation to Quark Matter has actually taken place. Quark Matter is composed of "free" quarks and gluons, the fundamental particles which are bound into protons and neutrons which make up normal nuclear matter. It is predicted that the Universe was entirely in the Quark Matter state several millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The method which we will use to make Quark Matter will be to collide beams of heavy nuclei (e.g. lead on 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 accelerators located at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. To determine whether Quark Matter has actually been created in these high energy heavy ion collisions, large particle detectors will be present to detect the secondary particles which are produced (mostly pi and K mesons and a range of more exotic particles). Theories predict that unique signatures for Quark Matter formation can be extracted from information obtained from these secondary particles. The role of the Ohio State University group is to participate in developing a new type of particle detector for these secondary particles called a "Silicon Drift Detector" and to analyze the data which we collect in these experiments to, hopefully, extract unique Quark Matter signatures.

该项目的主要物理目标是两个方面：1）在实验室中创建一种新的物质状态，称为“夸克物质”，将正常的核物质加热到足够高的温度/密度，并且同样重要的是，2）唯一确定对夸克物质的转化是否确实发生了。夸克物质由“游离”夸克和胶子组成，这些基本颗粒与构成正常核物质的质子和中子结合。据预测，宇宙完全处于夸克物质状态，大爆炸后几百万。我们将用来使Quark物质的方法将是碰撞重核的束（例如，铅在铅上，金上的铅在金上）以光速靠近光速移动。这些梁将由位于长岛布鲁克黑文国家实验室和日内瓦的CERN实验室的新的最先进的粒子加速器生成。为了确定是否在这些高能重离子碰撞中实际创建了夸克物质，将存在大型粒子探测器以检测产生的二次颗粒（主要是PI和K介子以及一系列更外来的颗粒）。理论预测，可以从从这些二次粒子获得的信息中提取夸克物质形成的独特签名。俄亥俄州立大学组的作用是为这些称为“硅漂移检测器”的二次粒子开发一种新型的粒子探测器，并分析我们在这些实验中收集的数据，希望可以提取独特的夸克物质特征。